Canvas

A canvas is an infinite board for thinking spatially. Put notes, images and loose text cards anywhere, group them, and draw arrows between them. Where the graph shows links you have already written, a canvas lets you arrange ideas before they have links.

Create a canvas

Use the New canvas command. Scaffold creates a .canvas file in your vault. It appears in the file explorer next to your notes and you can link to it like any other file.

What goes on a board

Card	Use
Text	A free-form Markdown card.
Note or file	A live view of a note, image or PDF from your vault.
Link	A web address shown as a card.
Group	A labelled frame that holds other cards.

Connect cards with edges. An edge can have an arrow at either end and a label. Cards and edges can be coloured with six preset colours.

Working on a board

• Pan by dragging the background and zoom with the scroll wheel or a pinch.
• Select several cards by dragging a rectangle, then move, resize, colour or group them together.
• Undo and redo cover every change to the board, including moves and edge edits.
• Copy and paste cards within a board and between boards.
• Touch gestures are supported, so boards work on a phone or tablet as well as with a mouse.

An open file format

Canvases are saved as JSON Canvas 1.0, an open format. The file is plain JSON with cards (nodes) and connections (edges), so other tools can read it and your boards do not depend on Scaffold.

Scaffold keeps properties it does not understand when it saves, so opening and saving a board made by another tool does not throw away that tool’s extra data. If a board is malformed, Scaffold opens what it can and shows warnings instead of refusing the file.

Everything on a board stays in your vault: cards that reference notes follow the notes when you rename them.

The canvas module can be switched off in settings. See Vaults for where .canvas files live.