The Board

Nodes, wires, and how to move around the infinite board.

The board is your document. Everything on it is a node: canvases, generators, effects, Frames, video. Wire them together and the picture flows left to right. Change anything upstream and everything downstream updates, live.

You never commit to a result. The whole chain stays editable until export.

Connecting nodes#

Inputs on the left, outputs on the right. Drag from an output to an input.

  • An input takes one wire. A new wire replaces the old one.
  • An output feeds as many inputs as you like.
  • Ports are colored by what they carry. Only compatible ports connect.
  • Let go of a wire on empty board and the usual next node lands there, already wired: an Image for a picture, a Number for a value.
  • Hold Alt/Option as you let go to choose the node instead. The Omni menu opens with only the nodes that fit.
Color Carries
Blue Images
Green Numbers, vectors, colors
Orange Text
Purple Video and audio clips
Yellow Signals: a value over time, like a sound's loudness
Cyan Live code render
Pink Materials
Gray Anything

Green ports interconvert, so one number can drive a color, a position, or a size.

Adding nodes#

Tab opens the Omni menu. Type a name, or what you want to do ("paint", "soften", "remove background"), and press Enter. Arrow keys move through the list. The new node lands under your pointer, and the nodes you added last wait at the top of the list. The line at the bottom says what the highlighted node does. Its Nodes tab lists every node; press Tab again for the Library tab, which holds brushes, images and subgraphs you can drop in. Shift+Tab opens the menu straight on the Library, and Brushes, Images and Subgraphs above the grid narrow it.

Drag an image file onto the board and it lands as a canvas. Drag a video or audio file and it lands as a clip. An SVG or Lottie file lands as editable vector shapes. Drag a .mage file and it lands as one node with that project inside.

Moving around#

  • Click selects. Cmd/Ctrl + click adds to the selection. Drag empty board to box-select. Cmd/Ctrl + A selects all.
  • F zooms to fit the selection. X collapses the selected nodes to a minimal view.
  • Space + drag or middle mouse to pan, or two fingers on a Mac trackpad. Pinch to zoom; on Windows the mouse wheel zooms.
  • Delete removes selected nodes. Right-click a node for more.

Cmd/Ctrl + C / V copies nodes and the wires between them.

Tuning nodes#

Every node shows its controls on the board. Drag a slider and everything downstream updates at once. Hover a control for what it does.

Rename with F2 or a double-click on the title. One undo (Cmd/Ctrl + Z) covers everything: sliders, wires, nodes, paint strokes.

Tidy up#

Select a cluster of nodes and press Cmd/Ctrl + G to fold them into one Subgraph node. Double-click to step inside. See Subgraphs.

Where to next#