Freeform Canvas boards, a living Nucleus graph, a home page that is a board, a refreshed Task board, a global Ctrl+K search, 50+ rebindable shortcuts, and a whole new season. Free, Lite and Plus all get a free upgrade.
Canvas Home (Plus only), Canvases available in Lite too
The flagships
- Canvas 🔵 Lite & Plus — freeform boards where you place, drag, link and arrange your nodes by hand.
- Task board 🔵 Lite & Plus — grouped, counted, swipe-to-complete.
- Nucleus 🟣 Plus — a living, self-arranging graph of your entire mesh.
- Canvas Home 🟣 Plus — an opt-in home page that is a canvas board, launcher and all.
- Ctrl+K quick search 🔵 Lite & Plus — a command palette across everything.
- Pinned bar 🟣 Plus — a taskbar-style bar for the nodes you pin.
- Configurable shortcuts— 50+ rebindable shortcuts with an in-app editor.
- Season 4 — Return to Bliss — fresh skins and two new UI modes.
Canvas
🔵 Lite & Plus. Freeform boards you build by hand — then tune to taste. Canvas is the
most customizable surface in the app, so here's the whole toolbox:
Boards & nodes
- Multiple boards — create, rename and delete them from the Canvas launcher (deleting a board keeps your nodes). Open a canvas node to dive into its board.
- Node display mode — switch each node between card, chip and title.
- Resize in both dimensions — drag or use grow/shrink buttons (with per-display min/max limits; buttons disable at a limit).
- Richer cards — a subtitle plus up to five description lines, all sized to content; image cards render at a compact landscape height.
- Move & tidy — drag anywhere (links redraw live), arrow-key nudge (Shift = 10px), duplicate, and Delete/Backspace.
Links & layout
- Choose which links show — all types, a subset, or hand-picked individual links; the link-type label appears at the line's midpoint on hover.
- Auto-arrange connected nodes — Force-directed, Grid or Radial, re-arranging in real time as you drag.
- Quick add-link to an existing or brand-new node (Esc cancels), and create a node on the spot from the Add dialog.
- Layers — a node can live on several; its badge lists them.
Look & highlight styles
- Highlight styles — highlight a node and its connections light up, in six per-board styles: Glow, Ring, Pulse, Stream, Halo, Spark (several animated).
- Circuit-board link effects — connected links animate to match: a directional or both-ways flow, a breathing glow, or a twinkle — each in that link's own colour, with travelling packets over dim solder-pads. Effects keep a constant on-screen size at any zoom and scale with link thickness.
- Highlight by Favorite, Focus, World or Tag — the palette shows which filter is active.
- Link appearance controls — tune lightness, thickness and saturation (shared with Nucleus) for readable links on any skin.
Background & board customization
- Per-board background image that behaves like a node image.
- Live background scrim — a colour wash with adjustable opacity and blend mode, previewed live, removable, following the board's rounded corners.
- Show task status — outline nodes red / yellow / green by to-do / in-progress / done.
- Favourite / focus right on the board with zoom-sized hover buttons and a skin-themed highlight chip.
Navigation
- Zoom & pan remembered per board; zoom out to 5%; double-tap the empty board to fit everything.
- Full undo / redo — buttons and Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y.
Canvas Home
🟣 Plus. Flip one switch in Settings and your home page becomes a canvas board
you browse, search and manage without ever leaving it. It's built to be shaped to your
workflow:
Layout & the side menu
- Three menu modes — hidden, rail (icons) or expanded (full launcher) — and you can pin it open. It remembers its mode, pin state and which sections are expanded across restarts.
- The whole launcher on your home — every feature box plus a single Add button (left-click opens the Add box, right-click the quick-add switcher).
- Translucent glass drawer so your board shows through — and in this release its text, icons and accents are legible on every skin, with feature icons on a contrasting circle so each one stands out.
Search & filters
- On-board node search — type to highlight matches live, then press Enter to escalate straight into the global Ctrl+K search, pre-filled with your query.
- Board-wide Focus / Favorite — toggle those filters for the whole board, and list the matching nodes honouring your current filters.
- Tag & world filters live in the menu, apply app-wide, support multiple tags, and are remembered between sessions.
The canvas switcher & board management
- Centred, self-hiding switcher — it sits at the bottom and fades out of the way while you pan, drag nodes or draw a link (and is inert mid-gesture, so a drag can't hit it by accident).
- Page between boards with arrows, PageUp/PageDown, the mouse-wheel, or a quick-jump menu; the landed board's name flashes as a centred toast.
- Reorder the current board (on-board arrows or Ctrl+Shift+←/→), rename (double-tap / F2 / ⋮ menu), set any board as home (Ctrl+H), duplicate (Ctrl+D), delete (with Undo) and create (Ctrl+N) — right there.
Comfort & resilience
- Resumes on your last board, repairs a deleted home board, and shows a friendly empty state (create button focused, so Enter makes your first board).
- Respects child lock and "disable animations", and falls back to your usual home wallpaper when a board has no background of its own.
- Discover every hotkey via the shortcuts help popover (Shift+? or the cycler's ?).
For everyone (including free)
- Configurable shortcuts & Help — 50+ rebindable shortcuts, an in-app editor, a Ctrl+? help dialog (shortcuts + gestures + a types legend), and a copyable cheat sheet. Global undo / redo on Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y.
- Season 4 — Return to Bliss — 12 new skins and two new UI modes: Aurora (free, soft glowing outlines) and Monolith (🟣 Plus, bold slabs).
- Optional remote database — point the app at a remote SQLite file instead of the local one (experimental; single-writer recommended).
- Faster & calmer — INSANE mode (Ctrl+Shift+I) for turbo + density, loading skeletons instead of spinners, precached wallpaper, and localised repaints.
- Everyday QOL — recent-nodes switcher (Ctrl+Shift+E), quick-add task (Ctrl+Shift+T), world context in the top bar (Alt+1…9), persisted sort, delete/pin confirmations with Undo, relaunch reopens your last feature, node backlinks, copy id / deep-link, relative timestamps, inline title editing — and a broad localisation sweep across 11 languages.
🔵 Lite & Plus
- Canvas — freeform boards (full details above).
- Task board — collapsible Focused / Other groups with counts, cleaner status headers, slicker cards, and swipe-to-complete.
- Ctrl+K quick search — nodes, worlds, types, tags and features; scope chips (remembered), recent searches, fully keyboard-driven.
- Solid colour background — black, white, cream, or any custom colour.
🟣 Plus
- Nucleus — a self-arranging graph of your whole mesh, centred on Everything or started from any node; 5 layout algorithms and several importance metrics, driven by your library filters, re-weighting and animating in real time, with link lightness/thickness/saturation controls.
- Canvas Home — your home page as a board (full details above).
- Pinned bar — a taskbar-style bottom bar for pinned nodes: auto-updates, highlights the node you're viewing, drag-to-reorder, translucent so your wallpaper shows through.
- World creation — the Add World flow, now reliable; Alt+1…9 switches worlds.
- v2 views — a new opt-in toggle to use the redesigned version of a view wherever one exists. Plus gets the redesign first.
- More customization — background blend mode + colour, custom background image (desktop), the Monolith UI mode, and the classic-grid ↔ canvas-board Home view switch.
Thanks for being here for version 6, it genuinely means alot to us. Definitely feels great to be back. ENJOY!
- ImmaterialAI team