Drawing & the canvas
The board is a full-bleed, infinite stage: pan anywhere, zoom from overview to detail, and draw at whatever scale the idea wants. Everything lives on the floating tool rail at the left edge; everything about a thing you've already drawn lives in the restyle pill that floats above your selection.
The tool rail
| Tool | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Select | V | Click, marquee, move, resize, rotate. |
| Hand | H | Pan. Or just hold space and drag from any tool. |
| Pen | P | Freehand ink. Strokes thin and thicken with pen pressure; with a mouse or trackpad, drawing speed stands in for pressure. |
| Eraser | E | Remove shapes — they fade under the eraser before they go, so you can see what a click will take. |
| Rectangle | R | Boxes. |
| Ellipse | O | Circles and ovals. |
| Line | L | Straight segments. |
| Arrow | A | Directional segments. |
| Connector | C | Lines that bind to shapes and follow them — see connectors. |
| Text | T | Click to place a text block and type. Escape or ⌘Enter finishes. |
| Sticky note | S | A colored note with text — the planning-wall register. |
Below the tools, the rail carries drawing-default chips: the ink color, stroke/text size, and (when the sticky tool is active) note color that the next shape is born with. They never touch existing shapes — restyling a selection is the pill's job.
Selection
With the select tool, click a shape or drag a marquee around several. A selection gets:
- Move — drag anywhere inside the bounds.
- Resize — corner and edge handles.
- Rotate — a handle above the selection (lines, arrows, and connectors don't rotate; their endpoints define the angle).
- The restyle pill — floats just above the selection: ink color, stroke or text size, note color when a sticky is selected, connector routing when a connector is, plus bring to front (
]), send to back ([), and delete. Restyles apply to the whole selection as one undoable change.
⌘A selects everything, ⌘D duplicates the selection, Backspace deletes it.
Undo is yours alone
⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z rewind and replay your changes — never a collaborator's. On a shared board, your undo can't yank someone else's stroke out from under them.
Images
Paste an image from the clipboard or drag files onto the board — each lands as a shape at the drop point (or the center of your view) and moves, resizes, and rotates like anything else. PNG, JPEG, WebP, and GIF up to 5 MB. Images belong to the board: they're visible to anyone who can see the sketch and nobody else.
Annotate a PDF
Drop a PDF onto the board and every page lands as its own image, laid out in a row at the page's true proportions — then draw, highlight, sticky-note, and connect on top with the regular tools, together. The camera fits the imported pages when they land. Long documents import their first 30 pages (the toast says so when one is cut).
Pasting isn't just for images — paste a ZeroWidth entity URL and it becomes a reference card; pasting the same content repeatedly staggers each copy so they don't stack invisibly.
Export as PNG
From the ⋯ menu, Export as PNG in three scopes:
Full sketchexport scopeEverything on the board, framed with a small margin.
Current viewexport scopeExactly what's on your screen — compose the shot by panning and zooming first.
Selectionexport scopeJust the selected shapes. Handy for lifting one diagram off a crowded board.
The same menu holds Make a copy — a duplicate board with all the current shapes, useful for forking a direction without losing the original — plus rename and archive.
Keyboard summary
V H P E R O L A C T S switch tools · space-drag pans · ⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z undo / redo · ⌘A select all · ⌘D duplicate · Backspace delete · [ / ] z-order · @ opens the entity picker.