Boards

A board in Zettly is an infinite canvas — a single, pannable surface that can hold anything from a quick sketch to a full project plan. The idea is closer to a whiteboard than to a document. You drop pieces onto it, wire them together, and rearrange them as the picture becomes clear.

The thing that makes Zettly boards different from other canvas tools is that the pieces you drop on a board are live. A note widget shows the actual note, in real time. A task widget reads from the same task hub you see in the Tasks surface. A calendar widget on a board is the same calendar you see in the Calendar surface. There are no stale copies and no manual syncing — when the underlying thing changes, the widget on the board changes too.

This page walks through the building blocks, the live widgets, and how to put a board together for a real piece of work.

The canvas itself

A board is a single, flat surface that extends in every direction. You pan with the middle mouse button or trackpad, zoom with the scroll wheel or the zoom controls, and fit the whole board to your window with a single keystroke.

A few things the canvas gives you by default:

• A grid that snaps widgets to a clean alignment. Toggle it off for freeform placement.
• Layers that let you separate concerns. A common pattern is a background layer for a project title or a sketch, a middle layer for the live widgets, and a foreground layer for annotations and ink.
• Minimap in the corner so you can find your way around a sprawling board.
• Zoom levels from “fit everything” to “edit a single widget up close.”

The canvas is the same engine that powers Decks & presentations, so anything you learn about drawing on a board works in slides too. The two surfaces share a vocabulary of shapes, connectors, and ink.

Live widgets: the reason boards matter

A widget is a piece of vault content dropped onto the canvas. When you drop a widget, it stays wired to the source — edit the source and the widget updates, no extra step.

The widget types you’ll use most:

• Note widget — a note rendered into a board-shaped card. You can resize it, place it anywhere, and the underlying note’s text and links are live. Tap into edit mode and you’re editing the real note, on the board. This is the most common widget, and the one you’ll use the most.
• Task widget — a slice of the Tasks hub. You can scope it to a project (a tag), a status, or a saved filter. New tasks you add on the board appear in the hub; tasks completed in the hub update on the board.
• Calendar widget — a slice of the Calendar surface. Drop a week or a month onto the board. Drag events to reschedule; the changes flow back to the calendar.
• Graph widget — a slice of the Knowledge graph scoped to a subset of notes (a tag, a folder, or a saved filter). It’s a great way to add context to a project board without crowding the canvas with notes.
• Mermaid widget — paste a Mermaid diagram source and it renders as a live, editable scene on the board. See the section on Mermaid below.
• Text widget — a sticky note or a free-floating text block. Useful for labels, headings, and callouts.
• Image widget — an image file from your vault, embedded at any size.

Widgets can be resized, rotated, and grouped. You can move them, layer them, and wire them together with connectors. The point is that a board is a composition — a single canvas that brings together whatever pieces of the vault matter for the work at hand.

Drawing tools

The drawing engine on a board is the same one used in note canvases and slides, so the experience is consistent across surfaces.

Drawing tools include:

• Ink with pressure sensitivity on supported devices
• Shapes — rectangles, ellipses, diamonds, arrows, lines, callout boxes
• Sticky notes for free-floating text
• Connectors that snap to anchor points on shapes and widgets
• A lasso for selecting and moving groups
• An eraser that understands which stroke you’re touching
• Snap-to-grid and snap-to-shape for tidy alignment

Connectors are worth a special mention. When you connect a widget A to a widget B, the connector follows them as you move either side. Connect a note to a task, and you’ve drawn a visual link between “what this is” and “what needs to happen.” A common pattern is to connect a project’s notes to its tasks, and the tasks to the calendar widget that shows the schedule — a one-board view of the whole project.

Mermaid: from source to scene

If you’ve written Mermaid diagrams (the mermaid code blocks popular in Markdown), you can paste the source directly into a board and Zettly converts it into a live, editable canvas scene.

Here’s what that means in practice:

1. You paste a Mermaid flowchart, sequenceDiagram, classDiagram, stateDiagram, erDiagram, or gantt source.
2. Zettly parses the diagram and lays it out as a set of canvas shapes, connectors, and text blocks.
3. The shapes are now first-class board objects — you can drag them around, change colors, edit labels, add new shapes, and wire them to live widgets.
4. The original Mermaid source is preserved alongside the scene, so you can round-trip back to plain text if you want.

The result is a diagram that you can sketch in text but then refine visually, without giving up the structured source. See Decks & presentations for how the same conversion works in slides.

Layers and organization

For a small board — a few notes and a quick sketch — layers are overkill. For a real project board, they earn their keep.

A common three-layer setup:

• Background layer. A title, a brief, a sketch of the project layout, a project logo. Locked by default.
• Widgets layer. All the live widgets — notes, tasks, calendar, graph. Where the work happens.
• Annotations layer. Ink, callouts, arrows, scratch work. The “thinking out loud” layer.

You can hide and show layers as you present the board, or use them to keep the canvas tidy as it grows. The layer panel is in the right sidebar.

Building a launch board: a worked example

Say you’re launching a small product. You have a project note, a list of tasks, a calendar with launch dates, and a handful of related notes from the planning phase. The launch board brings all of it into one view.

Step 1: Title and brief. Drop a text widget on the background layer with the project name and a one-line description. Lock the background layer.

Step 2: The project note. Drop a note widget containing your main project note (the “source of truth” for the launch). Pin it to the top-left of the widgets layer. This is the anchor the rest of the board hangs off.

Step 3: Related notes. Drop note widgets for the brief, the user research, the launch checklist, and any other notes the launch depends on. Position them around the project note. Connect each to the project note with a labeled connector — the labels become a visual map of how the pieces fit.

Step 4: Tasks. Drop a task widget. Scope it to a tag like #launch or a saved filter. The widget shows only the tasks for this launch. Drag tasks into a sensible order on the board.

Step 5: Calendar. Drop a calendar widget showing the launch month. Drag the milestones from the task widget onto the calendar to schedule them — the dates flow back to the task hub.

Step 6: Graph. Drop a graph widget scoped to the launch tag. The graph shows every note connected to the launch, organized visually. Move the widget to a corner of the board so it doesn’t compete with the main layout.

Step 7: Annotate. Switch to ink, draw arrows, add callouts. The “thinking out loud” layer.

What you end up with is a single canvas that you can open on any device and see the launch at a glance — what’s done, what’s left, when things happen, and how the pieces relate. The same board, presented in Decks & presentations, becomes a launch review.

Boards and the rest of the app

A few practical notes:

• Boards are stored as files in your vault. A board is a single file in a structured format, version-controllable and inspectable. The folder structure for boards is up to you.
• The same widget can live on multiple boards. Drop a note widget on your launch board and your weekly review board. Editing the note from either place updates both.
• Boards can be exported to PDF or PNG. Useful for sharing, especially with people who don’t use Zettly.
• Boards are canvas-native. The shapes, connectors, and ink from boards work in slides, and vice versa. See Decks & presentations.

When to use a board (and when not to)

Boards shine when:

• You have several pieces of vault content that need to be seen together
• The work is spatial — diagrams, layouts, plans, sketches
• You want a single screen that summarizes a project
• You’re preparing material that will eventually become a deck

Boards are less useful when:

• You’re writing a long document (use a note)
• You need a strict linear structure (use a deck)
• The thing you want to capture is a single concept (a note is enough)

The point is that boards are a composition surface. They bring other things together. The things themselves live in the surfaces that are best at them.

See Decks & presentations for what happens when a board becomes slides, and Knowledge graph for the visualization of the connections a board is making.