Managing canvases — many canvases, one node

A paint node is no longer limited to a single drawing. It can hold many canvases and switch between them live, and it comes with two canvases out of the box:

My canvas (🔒 local) — a private canvas kept on this device.
Public swarm canvas (🌐 swarm) — the shared canvas that replicates across your paired devices (see Sharing your canvas).

A canvas is just a folder on disk — a self-contained, replayable recording of every stroke — so canvases are cheap to make, safe to copy, and portable.

Switching canvases

The canvas dropdown sits at the top of the Paint activity, to the left of the Shortcuts… button. It shows the name of the canvas you are on; opening it lists every canvas you have, each with a kind glyph (🔒 local, 🌐 swarm). Pick one and the canvas switches in place.

A switch is not instant — the outgoing canvas is flushed to disk and the incoming one is streamed back from its checkpoint — so during the swap the viewport is covered by a brief spinner and the tools are disabled. When the incoming canvas has fully painted in, the tools come back. Nothing from the old canvas bleeds into the new one, and nothing you had painted is lost: the canvas you left is saved before the swap.

Creating a canvas

The dropdown's ＋ Add canvas… entry opens a small form. Give the new canvas a name and confirm; the node mints a fresh canvas folder, registers it, and switches you straight to it so you can start painting.

Managing canvases

Manage canvases… (also in the dropdown) opens the canvas manager — a list of every canvas where you can:

Rename a canvas.
Duplicate it — a full independent copy you can diverge from.
Delete one you no longer want. The Public swarm canvas cannot be deleted (it lives on the network — deleting would only forget your local copy), and it is shown greyed to make that clear.

Selecting a canvas opens its details: its kind, where it lives on disk, and its size — the bytes it occupies and how many tiles ("chunks") it holds.

Exporting a canvas

From a canvas's details, Export (folder)… copies the whole canvas folder to a location you choose. The copy is a complete, working canvas bundle — no export/flatten step, nothing to re-import specially: point another node's canvas list at that folder and it opens as-is. This makes a canvas easy to back up, hand to another device, or archive.

Where canvases live

You do not have to manage the folders yourself — the node keeps track of them for you — but if you are curious:

Local canvases live in this node's private per-identity area under the app data directory.
Canvases you create default to the app data directory too, unless you exported or placed them elsewhere.
The swarm canvas keeps a local mirror that fills in on demand as you look at it.

Seeing sync status

For a canvas that lives on the swarm, the node shows how far each part of it has caught up. This is on by default — you do not have to turn anything on. While a shared canvas is still catching up, its tiles carry a small status mark (queued, in transit with a progress ring, or a warning if a transfer needs attention), and the Current canvas row of the paint settings says online, syncing N of M chunks until everything has arrived. A fully synced canvas shows no marks at all.

If you would rather not see the per-tile marks, turn off Chunk swarm symbols in the Visualization category of the paint settings; the underlying replication keeps working either way — you are only hiding the indicator.

While the swarm is participating, the header carries the pill-shaped swarm chip (state icon, peer count, throughput spark) — click it to open Swarm Status. Turning participation off removes the chip from the header; the swarm settings stay one click away (Settings, or Swarm settings in the setup menu) when you want to turn it back on.

Swarm off — the chip leaves the header.