Views

A brainstorm has three views, and you can switch between them at any time without changing the content. Your choice persists per canvas.

The view switcher sits in the top-right of the canvas: Tile, Kanban, Graph.

Tile

The default. Notes are arranged in a flowing tile layout — small cards that pack into rows, with newer notes at the top. Connections render as soft lines between cards.

Best for:

• Active capture — adding notes and watching them classify
• Getting a sense of "shape" — you can see clusters forming
• Hover-dim — focus on one note's neighborhood without losing context

Tile view is the most relaxed of the three. It's where you'll spend most of your time when the brainstorm is still alive.

Kanban

Notes grouped into columns by type. There's one column per non-empty type, ordered roughly by canvas activity. Within a column, newest is at the top.

Best for:

• Reviewing what kinds of thinking you have a lot of (and what's missing)
• Manually reclassifying a note by dragging it to a different column
• Triaging — see all your blockers in one place, all decisions in another

Reclassification: drag a card to a different column to force a new type. The change persists; connections re-evaluate. The Thesis column won't accept drops — those are system-only.

Graph

A force-directed layout where notes are nodes and connections are edges. Closely-connected clusters draw together; isolated notes drift to the edges.

Best for:

• Seeing structure at a glance, especially in long-running brainstorms with 50+ notes
• Spotting clusters that should become a synthesis
• Identifying isolated ideas that don't connect to anything else

(Graph view ships in v1.0.1. The switcher pill exists but the view itself may be a placeholder until then.)

The Cmd+K palette

Press Cmd/Ctrl+K anywhere on the canvas to open the command palette.

The palette groups commands:

• View — Switch to Tile, Kanban, or Graph
• AI — Generate synthesis now (bypasses the cooldown, still requires 5 notes / 2 types)
• Filters — Reset all filters (clears any hover-dim or type-filter state)
• Export — Export as markdown (ships in v1.0.1; placeholder for now)

The palette is keyboard-driven — type to filter, arrow keys to move, Enter to run.

Hover-dim and the Esc key

In Tile and Graph views, hovering a note's connection-indicator dot dims unrelated notes to 30% opacity, leaving just the focused note and its connections at full brightness. This is great for reading a cluster without scrolling away from the rest of the canvas.

Press Esc to clear the hover-dim and bring everything back to full opacity. You can also click the same indicator again to toggle it off.

What persists between views

Switching views doesn't change anything on disk. The notes, types, annotations, and connections are all the same — just rendered differently. Your last-used view per canvas is remembered locally.