The Canvas

The Canvas is the Scene Board’s spatial mode — an open, pannable space where you can place scene cards anywhere, cluster them into groups, add notes, and draw connections between them. It’s the place to think about structure with your hands, the way you might with index cards on a wall.

Opening the Canvas

Open the Scene Board for a manuscript folder and switch to the Canvas. The layout you create is saved per folder, so each part of your manuscript keeps its own arrangement and you can return to exactly where you left off.

Cards and groups

Cards are your scenes. Drag them anywhere; their position is remembered.
Groups (frames) gather related cards — an act, a sequence, a set of alternatives. A folder can expand inline on the canvas to show its children in place.
Moving a card on the canvas is about spatial arrangement; it doesn’t change your manuscript order unless you reorder it deliberately.

Text boxes and arrows

The canvas isn’t just cards:

Text boxes let you drop headings, reminders, and free notes between your scenes.
Arrows connect cards — handy for tracing a setup to its payoff, marking cause and effect, or sketching how subplots weave together.

Selecting and arranging

Click a card to select it; lasso a region to select several at once.
A selection toolbar acts on everything you’ve picked — align, group, or move together.
Multi-select makes it quick to reorganize a whole sequence in one gesture.

Navigating the canvas

Pan by dragging the background and zoom to move between the big picture and the detail.
Search the canvas to jump straight to a card by title in a large board.
View controls help you fit everything to the screen or return to a known zoom level.

Prefer a structured, sortable layout instead? See the Outliner.