Whiteboard Tour

Thinking starts here. The whiteboard is Circuitry's fastest surface for getting an idea out of your head — sketch it, handwrite it, diagram it. And because the studio understands what you draw, none of it stays "just ink": handwriting becomes editable text as you write, rough boxes and arrows become structured diagrams, a labelled sketch can become a running workflow in one step, and a rough drawing can come back as a finished, generated image. The why and the wow are covered in The Smart Whiteboard — this page is the guided tour of the controls themselves.

One note before we start: shortcuts on this page show Cmd — on Windows and Linux, use Ctrl instead.

The pen tray

Your implements live in a dock at the bottom centre of the board. It stays tucked away while you work — only the nibs peek above the bottom edge — and rises when you hover over it or swipe it upward. When the tray is raised, each implement shows its name. Every implement remembers its own ink colour, so switching from a red marker back to your blue pen brings your blue back with it.

• — Pointer. Picks things up instead of drawing: tap an object to select it, drag to move it. Tap it again while active to switch modes — Object works with whole objects, Vertex exposes a shape's anchor points so you can reshape it point by point. In Vertex mode, right-click a point to switch it between a sharp corner and a smooth curve — a corner has no handles at all, and smoothing one grows a pair of handles along the line without pulling the shape out of shape. Right-click a handle itself to retract just that side, which straightens the line leaving that point while the other side keeps its curve.
• — Pen. The everyday freehand pen; stroke width responds to speed and pressure for natural-looking ink.
• — Path. A technical drafting pen for exact outlines. Click to place a corner point; press and drag as you place it to bend the line running into it, watching it curve as you go. Each point carries its own curve — the next line stays straight unless you drag when you place its end. Hold ⇧ while dragging to lock the curve to neat angles. Click your first point again to close the shape — drag as you click it to close with a curve — or double-click (or press Esc) to finish the path open. Points snap to the edges and corners of what's already on the board, and to the path you're drawing. Everything you draw stays editable afterwards with the Pointer in Vertex mode.
• — Pencil. A graphite-grey take on the pen — same responsive line, sketchbook feel.
• — Ballpoint. Constant-width ink in classic ballpoint blue, for tidy notes and annotations.
• — Marker. A felt tip with a constant, bolder line — its colour and opacity are remembered separately from your pens.
• — Highlighter. Wide, translucent strokes; overlapping passes build up just like a real highlighter.
• — Shape. Draw roughly and your stroke snaps to the shape you meant. Tap it again while active to open its shelf and force a mode: Auto, Rect, Oval, Circle, or Poly.
• — Write. The handwriting pen. In Auto OCR mode your handwriting converts to editable text as you pause; in Type mode it places a text cursor wherever you click. Tap it again to open the shelf and switch between the two (on iPad the default is Auto OCR; elsewhere it's Type).
• — Eraser. Removes whole strokes with a touch — no scrubbing required.
• — Arrow. Drag a straight connector with an arrowhead. Tap it again to open the end-cap shelf: None, Arrow, Triangle, Stealth, Circle, Square, Diamond, or Bar.
• — Select. Circle the ink you want with a lasso. Tap it again to switch the selection style: Lasso, Rect, or Brush.

On a pure whiteboard the canvas is the drawing surface, so there's nothing to exit. Once your sketch has become a workflow with nodes on the board, a small button appears at the tray's corner to hop back to node editing.

Tool keys

Every implement answers to one letter, all of them under your left hand so you can change tools without letting go of the mouse or the pen. Hover an implement and its tooltip shows the key.

Press the key of the implement already in your hand and its shelf pops up with the next mode already chosen — keep pressing to walk the modes, and the shelf tucks itself away a moment after you stop. Nothing to dismiss.

The property capsule

A floating capsule at the top centre shows exactly the properties that matter for the implement in your hand — nothing more.

• / — Whiteboard / blackboard toggle. Flips the board between light and dark — background, palette, and every stroke you've already drawn recolour to stay legible.
• Undo — Undo the last drawing change ⌘Z.
• Redo — Redo what you just undid ⌘⇧Z.
• — Select mode. Switch the canvas from inking to selecting and moving what's already there.
• — Hand. Pan the board by dragging — or just hold ⌘, or hold the middle mouse button (press the wheel), for a temporary pan without leaving your current tool.
• Colour — a round swatch in your current ink colour. Click it for a dozen curated colours plus a Custom picker for anything else.
• Size — a slider with a live nib preview, for quick thickness tweaks as you draw.
• Opacity — appears for the marker and highlighter; slide from a wash to full strength.
• — Font. Appears with the Write pen and text: choose the typeface your handwriting is recognised into, with your recent fonts on top and a More fonts… row for the full catalog. A – / + stepper sets text size when you're typing.
• — Snap. Appears while you're editing a shape's vertices or drawing in a fixed shape mode; toggles vertex snapping.
• — Paste. Appears when there's a drawing on your clipboard and nothing selected, so pasting is always one click away.

The left rail

A slim toolbar lives at the left edge — and stays out of your way: it retracts to the side while you work and slides back out when you hover over (or tap) its edge. Most of what you need day to day is in the pen tray below; the rail is how you reach more. Minimised, it carries just the essentials:

• — Pointer. One button for all three pointer modes — object, vertex (), and HTML () — for moving objects, reshaping paths, and interacting with live elements.
• — Text. Drop a text object anywhere on the board.
• — Fill. Flood a shape with colour; tap again to choose no fill, solid fill (with a colour-and-opacity panel), or gradient fill.
• — Clear all. Wipe the board and start fresh.
• — More tools. Expands the rail into the full toolbar; press again for a two-column grid layout, and once more to fold back down.

More tools

Expand the rail and the rest of the kit appears. Several buttons hold a small family of tools — the corner triangle marks them; tap again (or long-press) to pick:

• — Drawing tool. Holds Pen , Marker , Highlighter , and Smooth — the same inks as the tray, plus Smooth, which redraws a wobbly stroke as a clean curve.
• — Shapes. Auto-Recognise snaps your stroke to the shape you meant; or force Rectangle , Circle , or straight-segment Polygon, each with a from-centre variant.
• — Eraser. Removes whole strokes with a touch.
• — Icons. Stamp symbols and saved clips onto the board.
• — Select. Rectangle , Lasso , or Brush selection.
• — Replicator / Spiral / Gear. Three creative tools in one slot: repeat a selection in patterns, draw a spiral (an ideal path for text-on-path effects), or generate gear shapes. The button shows whichever you used last; long-press to switch.
• — AI Generate. Drag out an area, describe what you want, and it generates an image or HTML from your brief right into that spot. (Converting an existing selection into an image is the separate Sketch to AI button on the selection toolbar.)
• — Pan. Drag the board around; handy on touch screens.
• — Ruler. A straight edge for your pens: strokes drawn along it stay perfectly straight — great for perspective drawing and clean construction lines.
• Paper — lines, grid, squared, or blank, in a colour you choose.
• Size and Colour — compact duplicates of the capsule's controls.
• / — Undo / Redo.
• — Lock drawings. Freeze the ink so stray touches can't move it; tap again to unlock.

When you select something

Pick up the Pointer (or the Select lasso), click an object — or gather up several — and a row of round buttons appears above the canvas. It's the same set of actions as the right-click menu, in reach of a finger or a Pencil, and it changes with what you picked:

• Copy, Copy as Image, Paste (only when the clipboard has something), Duplicate, Clip+ to save it to your clip library, Lock, and Delete.
• Z-Order for stacking, and a bold G to group or ungroup two or more objects.
• Combine (Boolean) — the boolean / pathfinder operations on two or more objects: Unite, Subtract Front, Subtract Back, Intersect, Exclude Overlap, Divide. Unlike Group, these replace your objects with one new editable shape (holes and all). See Combining shapes.
• Edit → Convert Text to Paths turns a text object into editable letter shapes (Create Outlines), counters kept as real holes — for when you want to reshape the letters themselves. See Turning text into shapes.
• Mask (Clip) — clip one object to the shape of another: put an oval over a picture, mark the oval with Use as Mask, select both, and press Mask. Nothing is cut away — Release Mask gives both pieces back untouched. See Masking one shape with another.
• OCR to turn handwriting into editable text, Sketch to AI to make a finished image from a sketch, and 2vec to trace a picture into vectors.
• To Node when the selection contains something convertible into workflow nodes.
• More opens the full right-click menu just below the row.

Selecting a node instead of ink swaps the row for node actions — you always get one coherent set, never a mixture. The complete catalogue is in The Selection Toolbar.

Styling what you selected

Everything about how the selection looks lives in the Style panel on the right. Select something and a slim tab slides in from the right edge; click it and the panel opens with thickness, stroke and fill colour, opacity, corner radius, Line Style — dashes , ends and corners — arrowheads, shadow, glow, blur and 3D. tucks it away again, and View → Style Panel remembers which way you like it. Under those controls, a Presets strip saves the whole look of an object behind and re-applies it to any selection with one click. Full tour: The Style Panel.

Resizing text

Text you place with the Write pen can be given a column: drag out a box instead of clicking, or drag the corner of the frame while you're editing, and the words wrap inside that width and stay there. With a text object selected, ⌘= and ⌘- grow and shrink it — the type and its column together, so the shape of the paragraph is kept. Dragging a corner handle does the same by hand. If you wanted a different width all along, double-click back into the text and drag its frame to set one.

Exact sizes and positions

Dragging a handle is quick; sometimes you want a number. With something selected, Edit → Transform… opens a small floating panel with X, Y, W, H and a rotation field. Type a value and the object changes as you type — nothing dims or covers the board, and you can drag the panel by its title bar to get it off whatever you're looking at. The link button between W and H keeps the proportions, and the rotation field turns the selection by that many degrees around its own centre.

Zoom and view

• Zoom in / Zoom out — a floating column at the bottom left.
• — Fit view. Frames everything on the board — and it's ink-aware, so your drawings count, not just nodes.
• — Full screen ⌘⇧⏎ — hides the app chrome so the board fills your display; the same shortcut brings everything back.

Keyboard

A nice touch: with a single text object selected, ⌫ doesn't delete it — it drops you into editing the text, exactly where a typo fix wants to be.

Taking artwork off the board

Select anything you've drawn and use File → Export Selection as SVG… to download it as a scalable vector file, cropped to just those objects. Shapes stay shapes, pen strokes keep their drawn outline, and the file opens in any design tool — so a diagram sketched here can go straight into a document or a deck without turning into a screenshot.

Works with the rest of the studio

The whiteboard is one surface of one studio — what you draw here flows everywhere else:

• The Smart Whiteboard — the full story: think, plan, direct, and create on one canvas
• Sketch to Diagram — how blocks, connectors, and node conversion work in depth
• Workflows — where your converted sketch runs
• Nodes — every block your diagram can become
• Designer — when a sketch turns into vector and UI work
• Sharing & Live Collaboration — put the board in front of your team
• The Agentic IDE — hand the result to a coding agent