Docs The canvas
Features

The canvas

Updated October 4, 2026

Every workspace opens on its canvas: an open surface where you collect what a task is about. Everything on it is a block: a note, an image, a file, a link, a repository, a code excerpt or a group. Everyone in the workspace sees the same canvas, live, with each other's pointers and selections.

Adding blocks

The toolbar sits at the bottom left of the canvas.

  • Add opens a menu: Note, Link, Repository or Group.
  • Upload picks files from your computer. Images become image blocks, everything else becomes a file block. A file can be at most 200 MB.
  • Organize… tidies the canvas by type or into islands of nearby blocks, with a preview before anything moves.
  • Undo and Redo name the step they take back, for example "Undo move".

You can also skip the toolbar:

  • Paste an image, a web address (it becomes a link block) or text (it becomes a note).
  • Drop files from your computer onto the canvas, or drag a row from the sidebar's Files section (see Files).
  • Right-click the canvas for Organize…, Undo, Redo, Select all and Fit to screen.

Select and Hand

The switch at the top left sets what dragging does:

  • Select (V): drag a block to move it; drag on empty canvas to draw a box and select every block it touches.
  • Hand (H): drag anywhere to pan.

In Select mode you can still pan by holding Space, dragging with the middle mouse button, or scrolling.

Selecting, moving and resizing

  • Click a block to select it. Shift+click adds or removes a block. ⌘/Ctrl+A selects everything; Esc clears the selection.
  • Drag a block from anywhere on it to move it, with the rest of the selection.
  • Arrow keys nudge the selection by 1 pixel, or 10 with Shift.
  • Resize a block from any corner or edge. Each kind of block has a minimum size.

Every change is one step for Undo (⌘/Ctrl+Z) and Redo (⌘/Ctrl+Shift+Z, or Ctrl+Y).

Zoom and pan

The zoom control at the bottom right has −, the current percentage (click it to go back to 100%), + and Fit, which shows every block. ⌘/Ctrl+scroll or a trackpad pinch zooms around the pointer; Shift+scroll pans sideways. Zoom goes from 25% to 200%.

Only the canvas zooms. In the signed-in app a pinch or ⌘/Ctrl+scroll over the header, a sidebar, the footer or a menu does not zoom the page, so the frame always stays in place. The browser's own ⌘/Ctrl + and − still work.

The block's actions

Select one block and a bar of icons appears above it, such as Expand (or Edit on a note) and Ask AI, with a … menu for the rest.

Expand opens the block in a large panel over the canvas: a note to write in, a file's full preview, a link's page, a group's contents or a repository's explorer. Double-click or Enter does the same; Close, Esc or a click outside the panel puts it away. The sidebars, the chat and the footer stay usable while it is open. On a narrow screen the block takes the whole canvas instead.

Pin, in the … menu, keeps a block in the agent's context for this workspace and for new projects. A pinned block has a striped border and a PINNED marker, selected or not; Unpin is in the same menu. Link to project ▾, also there, puts the block into an existing project; dragging blocks onto a project's row in the sidebar does the same.

The selection bar

The bar centred at the bottom says what is selected (SELECTION · 3 BLOCKS), or that the whole canvas will be used when nothing is.

⌘/Ctrl+G puts two or more selected blocks in a group. A project's canvas has no selection bar: a project has one spec, and is closed when it is done.

Copying and deleting

⌘/Ctrl+C, ⌘/Ctrl+X and ⌘/Ctrl+V copy, cut and paste selected blocks. Into another workspace only notes, links and groups come along; a message says what was left out.

To delete, press Delete or Backspace, or choose Delete… from the block's … menu. Yard asks first and names what goes, including what is inside a group. Undo brings it back, and the history keeps every saved version.

When the runner is offline

The canvas lives on the workspace's runner. When the runner goes offline, or the connection lags, a red Runner offline · read-only pill shows at the top of the canvas. You can still look around, pan and zoom, but changes are refused with a message until the runner is back.

Edits that were already on their way when the runner went are not lost. The footer counts them as changes waiting for the runner. When it is back, Yard applies them, says "Applied N changes made while the runner was away", and offers Undo if you would rather not keep them.

The footer's right end shows one status for the workspace: Healthy, Lagging, Runner offline or Not set up. Click it for the details: Connection (how long a round trip to the API and on to the runner takes, when the last reply came, and the recent round trips), Runner (online or offline, whether the workspace is read-only, and how busy the runner's machine is: CPU, memory and the disk the workspaces are on, with a warning from 75% and "near limit" from 90%; runners older than 0.8.1 do not report this) and Storage (whether the workspace is saved to storage, and when it last was).

Viewers always see the canvas read-only. See sharing and roles.