Canvas group sizing & arrangement manager

Use case or problem

If you have a set of notes and cards with various different uses and thus arrangements. Switching between these arrangements and sizing of the elements can be a bit slow.

Proposed solution


Edit: Thanks to the respectful and upfront response from WhiteNoise saying my described implementation is unlikely, I want to make it clear that I would be very happy with any sort of functionality that saves arrangements and sizing of Canvas elements.


The workflow could start by selecting multiple notes and cards in the canvas and defining a group name. This is used to identify the set to be independently managed. It stores the arrangement and sizing of its elements relative to the groups anchor.

There could be a button that, when clicked, reveals a dropdown of the various defined group names, and, when you click or hover over one of the groups in the dropdown, the various saved arrangement/sizing profile names are shown unfolded from the group name. Clicking on one of them rearranges and sizes the elements of the group to the saved setup.

By selecting a group anchor, the drop down reveals if it was not already revealed and displays the current arrangement if it has been saved. Moving the group anchor moves the entire group but doesn’t affect the arrangement/sizing profiles.

This feature could be more elegant. For example, there could be an alternate workflow that simply relies on hotkeys that toggle through the profiles. The naming could be done automatically according to a convention that works in the background but is accessible for renaming from the dropdown. Regardless, I think this would be a very valuable addition to the canvas toolset.

Related feature requests (optional)

Group request: Add group option to keep "card" and/or "note" together in CANVAS

Thanks!

3 Likes

You want to have multiple groups and multiple arrangements per group in the same canvas. That’s unlikely to happen.

1 Like