canvas

A diagram of steps in boxes joined by arrows, read rather than operated, and now more often generated from a few lines of text than drawn by hand.

A shrunken overview of a long document or canvas beside the scrollbar, with a box showing which part is currently on screen.

A canvas of boxes wired to each other by lines, where each box does one job and the wiring between them is the thing being built, rearranged by dragging.

The typed stub on a node where a wire may land, coloured or shaped by what it accepts, so a connection that would make no sense refuses to complete.

How a connector gets from one node to another: a bezier sweep, a right-angled staircase, or a straight line, picked so the crossings stay readable.

A focus plus context display that magnifies whatever has attention and progressively compresses everything further away, like a lens dragged along a list.

A layout that keeps one region in full detail inside its own surroundings, shrinking or dimming the context instead of moving it into a second pane.

Placing the nodes of a wired diagram by algorithm rather than by hand: layered for a flow, radial for a hub, force-directed for a mesh that has no direction.

A workspace with no page edges, where content is placed anywhere in an unbounded plane and the viewport pans and zooms over it instead of scrolling a document.

A layout that shows a compressed overview and a detailed view at the same time in separate regions, so the reader keeps their place while inspecting one part.

Switching between two views of the same content, a zoomed out view of group headings and a zoomed in view of individual items, instead of scaling pixels.

Acting on an object by handling the object itself, dragging, resizing, or typing into it, rather than describing the change in a separate control.

Dragging a selection across one chart to highlight the same records in every linked view.

Making a new object by dragging out its extent rather than pressing Add: an event drawn across two hours, a frame drawn on a canvas, a range drawn on a chart.

Selecting by dragging a boundary around items on a canvas, freehand or as a rectangle, so whatever the outline encloses becomes the selection when the drag ends.

Moving or changing a value by one small fixed step with an arrow key, with a modifier switching to a larger step.

Rotating a camera around a fixed point by dragging, so the scene appears to turn while the subject stays centred.

Moving the viewport across content in any direction while keeping contact, so the content feels anchored to the finger or cursor.

Two fingers moving apart or together on a surface to scale content up or down, with the scale tracking the distance between them.

Two fingers turning around a common center to rotate the object or view beneath them, the angle tracking the fingers as they orbit.

Alignment lines that appear only while dragging, showing which edges or centers the moving object currently lines up with.

Pulling a dragged object into exact alignment once it comes within a small distance of a grid, guide, or another object's edge.

The animated dashed outline that circles a selection, moving continuously so the boundary reads as active rather than drawn.

A faint repeating field of dots or ruled squares behind content, borrowed from graph paper and canvas tools to suggest an editable surface rather than a page.