Canvas is a cross-platform, cross-device desktop world overlay to help organize your work, workflows and unstructured data of your own Universe into Workspaces, organizing data into virtual bitmap-powered context and directory-like trees, with shareable, bindable contexts on top, built on LMDB, roaring-bitmaps, embedding vector trees and coffee.

Yeah, no worries, there is some ai(tm) in there somewhere too.

The TL;DR version:

• Create a Workspace
• Add data backends you want to index(local fs, s3, imap mailboxes, messaging apps)
• Start building a context tree on top of your data that follows whatever mental model is suitable to work on your tasks
• Configure import/ingestion hooks
  • Optionally setup share ACL tokens, link agents, get another coffee
• Create Contexts and Canvases
• Bind applications to them, so that switching from work://customer-a/devops/jira-1234 to work://customer-b/sec-compliance/reports will automatically load all your context-related
  • files
  • contacts
  • email threads (based on contacts, email subject or a specific thread identifier)
  • chat conversations
  • browser tabs(urls)
  • notes
  • todo items in every bound application. No more 1000+ browser tabs waiting for session corruption, deskto folders with TO_SORT folders within older TO_SORT folders, ad-hoc notes, scripts and random files evenly trashing your hard-drive.

Switching between tasks becomes like switching between an organized set of canvases placed nicesly on a clean desk, with a task-customized toolbox, in a task-dedicated office!(or whatever abstraction is more aligned to your internal world model :)

Context switches may still be expensive, but they can now be orders of magnitude more efficient.

(TODO)

(one day there will be a video

here somewhere

)

A Contex Tree is a virtual file-system like tree structure composed of tree nodes(layers) and may look as follows:

universe://
├── home
│   ├── music
│   │   └── concerts
│   │       └── tiny-desk
│   │           └── 2025
│   └── travel
│       ├── 2024
│       │   └── belgium
│       │       └── brussels
│       └── 2025
│           └── spain
│               └── barcelona
└── work
    ├── customer-a
    │   ├── devops
    │   │   ├── jira-1001
    │   │   ├── jira-1002
    │   │   └── jira-1003
    │   ├── inc
    │   │   ├── snow1001
    │   │   ├── snow1002
    │   │   └── snow1003
    │   ├── rca
    │   ├── reports
    │   │   ├── finance
    │   │   └── sec-compliance
    │   └── team
    └── customer-b
        ├── billing
        ├── kb
        ├── projects
        │   ├── bar
        │   ├── baz
        │   └── foo
        └── sec-compliance
            └── reports
                └── 2025
                    ├── 01
                    ├── 02
                    └── 03

Context is a session-like object aplications can bind to. It points to a specific tree path and emits events on relevant backend updates; switching a context url for example from work://customer-foo/project-foo to work://customer-foo/project-bar will notify all listenerds to update their state (fetch relevant documents, update dotfiles - yes, dotfiles!, kick some agents into action or close your external shades)

Canvas is simillar to a stored database view, with optional UI configuration for the UI layout, widgets and applets. You can have a canvas called "Morning coffee" with a widget showing todays messages/emails, a column with todays tasks and a widget playing your morning playlist. Canvas can be exported and accessed as a static website and opened on your TV/tablet/phone; moving your canvas from /customer-a/Morning cofee to /customer-b/Morning cofee automatically loads relevant data based on the path it is placed at.

Canvases and Contexts are shareable, your colleagues can bind to/follow your context and add notes or their own browser tabs or files. You can access all indexed data directly within your OS(webdav-mounted workspace, canvas-electron, browser-extension) or via webui or cli or even plain curl.

Universe is your default(home) workspace.
Your Universe can be further split into self-contained, movable/shareable Workspaces, each running its own in-process database with a context tree abstraction on top(you may want to have a dedicated workspace per customer or project; a handover to a BAU engineer would then be just a matter of export - import of your project workspace).

Context tree Layers are unique - a reports layer in /work/customer-a/reports and /work/customer-b/reports is stored under the same uuid linking to the same bitmap - renaming/removing/updating one will update all occurences in the context tree.
Context layers filter different data based on where they are placed. Iow, moving /customer-a/reports returns reports of customer-a, /customer-b/report of customer-b, creating /reports will return all data tagged/linked to the reports layer for all customers.

Canvas-server is a small nodejs-based runtime that can be run directly on your machine or dockerized almost anywhere you want(lets say your home NAS or your favorite trusted cloud provider).

You can index almost any data type regardless where it is stored, retrieval can use client context data like network location, OS, device ID etc to make a roaming experience as smooth as your network latencies allow; reads from remote locations are cached using cacache[2].

A common use-case of a shared "Travel" context: Lets say you are planning your upcoming vacation and looking for accommodation "the-old-fashioned-way"(tm) by searching the interweb yourself.
You set your context to home://travel/2025/europe/spain(via command-line of course: $ context set home://travel/...), this will update all your linked applications - in our example browser tabs - and you start opening your listings. Your significant other can connect to the same shared context and start adding new tabs, closing the already reviewed ones, even adding notes or contacts. All context tree events are propagated to all connected clients(whenever someone opens a browser tab, a new tab is auto-created or auto-closed on all linked browsers(if configured to do so)).

• You own your data
  You can run every part of the application stack wherever you want, with whatever data or compute backend you want
• Offline first
  Iow - if a solar CME kicks this civilization back to the stone age(again?) and you happen to have a working power source, you can still browse all your metadata || cached data to check on your appointments, emails, tax returns and all the other stuff you no longer have to worry about (or browse cached content related to things you need to worry about)

• https://github.com/canvas-ui/canvas-server
• https://github.com/canvas-ui/canvas-synapsd
• https://github.com/canvas-ui/canvas-stored
• https://github.com/canvas-ui/canvas-web
• https://github.com/canvas-ui/canvas-browser-extensions
• https://github.com/canvas-ui/canvas-cli

• By opening a new issue in any existing repository
• By picking an issue to work on from https://github.com/orgs/canvas-ui/projects/2
• Saying hello in Slack
• Or spamming us directly via dev@getcanvas.org