CodaMail - Canvas Boards

🗺️ What a Canvas Board Is

A canvas is an infinite board where you arrange cards in space and connect them with arrows: mind maps, project boards, research walls, planning diagrams. Cards can hold Markdown text, one of your notes shown in place, an image, a PDF, audio or video, or a web link, and cards can be gathered into labeled groups.

Boards are stored in the open JSON Canvas format, the same .canvas files Obsidian uses. A board you build in webmail opens natively in Obsidian, a board you build in Obsidian opens in webmail, and edits from either side sync to the other. We are not aware of any other email service that can display these boards at all, let alone edit them.

Any note in your notebook with the .canvas extension opens as a board. Create one from the New menu in Notes: give it a name and choose where it goes. Each new board gets its own project folder, named after the board, because a board gathers things around it: files you upload from the board land in that folder, and the notes you embed stay beside it. New boards start with a small template, so the first steps are on the board itself.

Boards also arrive by uploading a .canvas file or by syncing one from Obsidian, and those can live wherever your vault puts them.

👀 Viewing a Board

Open a canvas note and the whole board appears, scaled to fit your window. Getting around:

Pan: Drag anywhere on the empty board background (or scroll, or swipe on touch screens).
Zoom: Hold Ctrl and scroll, centered on your pointer, or use the + and − buttons.
Fit: The fit button returns the whole board to view.
Full screen: The expand button takes the board full screen; press Esc to leave.

Cards that embed one of your notes show its live content, images display in place, PDFs open in the built-in viewer, and audio and video cards play right on the board. Web link cards show their address and open in a new tab; nothing from the outside web is ever loaded into the board itself.

To rename a board, double-click its title above the board. Every control has a hover description, in your language.

✏️ Editing: the Pen and the Toolbar

Click the pen button to enter edit mode. The board gains a highlighted border and a toolbar appears at the bottom with everything you can add:

Card: A new Markdown text card, dropped at the center of your view with the editor already open.
Note: Pick any note from your notebook and place it on the board as an embedded card.
Web link: Type or paste an address to place a link card.
Group: A labeled box for gathering related cards. Double-click a group to name it; moving a group carries everything inside it.
Upload: Choose a file from your device. It is added to your notebook and placed on the board in one step.

Double-click any text card to edit it with the full Markdown formatting toolbar (bold, italic, headings, lists, quotes, code, links). Text in cards is Markdown, exactly as in Obsidian, so headings give you sizes and emphasis gives you weight.

Your changes are held on the board until you click Save. A discard button returns to the last saved version, and if you try to navigate away with unsaved changes, we ask first.

📏 Arranging Cards

Move: Drag any card. Alignment guides appear and cards snap to the edges and centers of their neighbors; hold Alt to place freely.
Resize: Drag the corner mark at a card’s bottom right.
Select several: Shift-click cards to add them one by one, or hold Shift and drag on empty board to sweep up everything in a rectangle. Dragging any selected card moves them all together.
Color: Select a card and pick from the color menu that appears above it. Colors apply to every selected card and match Obsidian’s palette.
Duplicate and delete: Both live in the same floating menu; Delete on the keyboard removes the selection too.
Room to grow: The board expands automatically as you drag or place cards beyond its edge. There is no boundary to manage.

⟶ Drawing Arrows

In edit mode, every card shows four connector dots on its sides. Drag from a dot to another card and an arrow is drawn between them. Arrows stay attached: move either card and the arrow follows.

Click any arrow to work with it. The menu that appears lets you:

Color the arrow (same palette as cards)
Label it with text that rides along the line
Delete it (the Delete key works too)

Deleting a card removes its arrows with it, and everything is undoable.

⌨️ Undo, Redo & Shortcuts

Every board action is one undo step, fifty levels deep, and undo keeps your zoom and scroll position. While editing a board:

Ctrl+Z undo, Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y redo (also available as toolbar buttons)
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+X / Ctrl+V copy, cut, and paste cards, arrows included, even between two different boards
Ctrl+D duplicate the selection
Delete remove the selected cards or arrow
Shift multi-select (click) and box-select (drag)
Alt while dragging: skip snapping
Esc close an editor or leave full screen

While typing inside a card, the usual text editing shortcuts belong to the text editor, as you would expect.

🔄 Working with Obsidian

Canvas boards travel through the same WebDAV notes sync as the rest of your notebook. With Obsidian and the Remotely Save plugin, a vault’s .canvas files appear in webmail as boards and stay editable in both places. Cards that reference other vault files resolve by name, so a board’s embedded notes and images work on both sides.

Obsidian’s .base files (database views) are also stored and synced faithfully, though they display as file cards rather than rendered views; a Base is a query over your vault that only Obsidian can evaluate.

🔒 Privacy

Boards live with your notes: encrypted in transit and at rest, no tracking, no analytics. The board never fetches anything from the outside web. Link cards are shown as addresses only, with no page previews or thumbnails, and everything embedded on a board comes from your own notebook on our servers.

🚑 Need Help?

If you have questions about canvas boards or run into anything unexpected, contact our support team at helpdesk@codamail.com.