Organizing Canvases

Once you have more than a handful of boards, a flat list stops helping. The Canvases sidebar section is a real tree: canvases sit in folders, folders nest, and you move things between them by dragging or from a menu.

Folders are ordinary directories in your vault. A canvas in Work/Q3 is the file canvases/Work/Q3/Plan.excalidraw, so the tree in the sidebar and the folders in your file manager are the same thing — make a folder either way and it shows up in the other.

Creating folders

• At the top level, hover the Canvases section header and click the folder button (New canvas folder) beside the +.
• Inside another folder, right-click that folder — or focus it and use its ⋯ button — and choose New folder.

Either way the folder is created immediately, under a default name, and its row in the tree turns into a text field with that name selected. Type the real name and press Enter. Esc keeps the default name, and clicking away accepts whatever you have typed.

Folders nest up to eight levels deep; anything that would go deeper is refused rather than filed somewhere unexpected. A name the vault cannot accept — one that is already taken, or too deep — leaves the field open with the reason beside it, so you can type another one.

While the section is completely empty there is no row to right-click, so it offers New canvas and New folder links directly. That is how the first folder in a fresh vault gets made.

An empty folder is still a real folder. It reaches your other devices even before you put anything in it, so you can set up a structure on one machine and find it waiting on the next.

Putting canvases in folders

• New canvas here — from a folder's menu. The new board opens in a tab, the folder expands to show it, and its row opens as a text field so you can name it without leaving the tree.
• Drag a canvas onto a folder row. The row outlines while it is a legal drop.
• Drag a folder onto another folder to move it, with everything inside.
• Drag to the root — the dashed strip under the last row is the way back out of a folder. It appears while you are dragging.

A move that would nest past the depth limit, or that would drop a folder into its own subtree, simply refuses the drop.

Doing all of it from the keyboard

Drag and drop has no keyboard path, so every placement action also lives in a menu. Each row has a focusable ⋯ button holding the same items as its right-click menu — including Move to folder, which lists every folder in the tree plus Root. The folder a canvas is already in is greyed out.

Two shortcuts work directly on a focused row:

Key	Action
F2	Rename the canvas or folder
Delete / Backspace	Delete, with a confirmation

Renaming

Rename from the row menu, or F2, turns the row itself into a text field with the current name selected — there is no dialog, so the row never moves out from under you.

• Enter commits the new name.
• Esc abandons the change and leaves the old name.
• Clicking away commits too; an empty or unchanged name is simply not written.

If the name is refused, the field stays open with the reason beside it and the caret comes back to it, ready for another try.

Renaming a canvas renames its file too, so the board and the file keep the same name. Renaming a folder moves the directory and everything inside it in one go — the canvases keep their own names and follow the folder.

Icons

Click the icon at the start of any row to open the picker and give a canvas or a folder an emoji. The row menus also carry Set icon and, once one is set, Remove icon. Folder icons sync along with the folder.

Duplicating a canvas

Duplicate copies the board — ink, cards, images and icon — into the same folder as the original, with a number appended to the name (Plan becomes Plan 2). The copy is a separate canvas from that point on; editing one does not touch the other.

A canvas whose file is missing or unreadable cannot be duplicated. Its row shows a warning instead, and offers only Reveal in Finder and Delete.

Finding a canvas

Once the section holds eight or more canvases, a filter box appears above the tree. Type to narrow the tree to matching canvases and the folders that contain them; Esc clears it. A query that matches nothing says so and keeps the box on screen, so there is always something to clear.

A collapsed folder shows the number of canvases inside it, so you can see where things are without opening everything. An expanded folder with nothing in it says so, and offers a New canvas here link.

Opening a canvas outside memrynote

Two items in a canvas row's menu leave the app:

• Reveal in Finder opens your file manager with the .excalidraw file selected.
• Open in external editor hands the file to whatever your system opens .excalidraw files with.

Both act on the real file in your vault. If you edit a canvas in another application, memrynote picks the change up the next time it opens the vault.

Deleting

Delete always asks first.

• Deleting a canvas removes it from memrynote and sends its file to this computer's trash.
• Deleting a folder takes everything inside it — the confirmation tells you how many canvases that is — and sends the whole directory to the trash.

Deletions sync, so a canvas you delete on one device disappears on the others. On those other devices the file is removed outright; only the device you deleted from keeps a copy in its trash.

That trash copy is a copy of the file, not an undo. Putting it back in your vault does not bring the canvas back into memrynote: the delete is what every device now agrees on, and a file reappearing must not overrule it — otherwise a removal that failed on one machine would resurrect the canvas everywhere. To get the drawing back, open the restored file in an Excalidraw editor and copy it into a new canvas.

Next steps

• Cards & Links — putting notes, tasks, and events on a canvas
• Sync & Limits — how canvases and folders sync