Boards — collaborative whiteboards

Boards are collaborative infinite-canvas whiteboards built into Mockarty: sketch
architecture, plan a sprint, run a retro, draw a flow — together, in real time,
with everyone’s cursors and changes visible live. Boards are organised in
folders with tags and filters, ship with templates, and keep a version history.

Open them from the sidebar: Boards (/ui/whiteboards).

Organising boards

The left panel is one tree, in the same style as the wiki page tree: folders
are expandable branches, boards are their leaves.

• Folders — expand or collapse a branch by clicking it; the badge shows how
  many boards it holds, sub-folders included. Double-click (or F2) renames a
  folder in place; right-click (or the ⋯ on hover) opens its menu: new board
  here, new subfolder, rename, move, collapse, delete. Deleting a folder moves
  its boards up to the parent, so a board never disappears with a folder.
• Boards — click to open. The star marks a favorite, the small badge shows
  how many sheets the board has. Right-click (or ⋯) for open, favorite,
  rename, folder & tags, copy link, select, delete.
• Drag and drop — drag a board onto a folder to move it there, onto the
  empty pane background to move it out of every folder; folders can be dragged
  into other folders the same way.
• Keyboard — arrow keys walk the tree, Enter opens a board or toggles a
  folder, Shift+F10 opens the row menu.
• Select several — choose Select in a board’s menu: checkboxes appear on
  every board and the bar above the tree moves or deletes the whole selection.
• Tags — every board can carry tags; the tag chips under the tree filter it
  with one click.
• Search — filter boards by name or description as you type; folders that
  lead to a match stay open.
• New board — the + button opens the create dialog with the template
  library and a folder picker; a folder’s menu creates a board right inside it.
• Recycle Bin — deleting a board moves it to the Recycle Bin,
  where it can be restored (version history included) until the retention
  period purges it.

Templates

When you create a board you can start from a template instead of a blank canvas:

• Blank — an empty canvas.
• ADR — an Architecture Decision Record layout (context / decision /
  consequences / alternatives).
• C4 architecture — a C4 container diagram skeleton.
• Flowchart — a start → step → decision → end flow.
• Retro — went-well / could-improve / action-items columns.

Drawing and real-time collaboration

The canvas is a full drawing surface — shapes, arrows, text, freehand, images,
frames, colours, zoom and a tool palette. The burger menu in the canvas’s
top-left corner holds the board’s own actions — import, export, version
history, save version, fullscreen, grid on / off — next to the canvas settings
(search, background, theme, help, clear).

The canvas follows your theme: white in the light theme, the product’s dark
surface in the dark theme, with a faint draw.io-style grid (a stronger line
every fifth cell) that pans and zooms with the drawing and fades out when the
cells get too small. Turn it off from the burger menu — the choice is
remembered per browser. Pick a background colour in the canvas settings and it
covers the grid; exports always render on white (or your chosen colour).

• Text in a shape — select a shape and press Enter, or double-click inside
  it, and type: the text stays centred and wraps inside the shape; click
  outside or press Esc to finish.

• Open a board and everyone who opens it is in the room together: you see
  each other’s live cursors and every change as it happens.

• Follow mode — click a teammate’s avatar in the presence bar and your
  canvas mirrors their pan and zoom: perfect for walkthroughs and reviews.
  Click again to stop following.

• Discussions — the chat icon next to the presence bar opens a discussion
  thread about this board in the side dock; mention @agent there to ask the
  AI to change the scene with the conversation as context.

• Your work autosaves continuously; the save status shows next to the board
  name.

• Connect boxes with arrows to build architecture diagrams, ADRs and flows.

• Connection points — hover a shape and eight anchor dots appear: the four
  side midpoints plus the four corners. Drag from a dot to start an arrow
  right there; press Esc mid-drag to cancel it. The arrow snaps to the
  shape you started from and to the one you drop it on, and stays attached
  when either shape moves. The arrow type picker in the board toolbar
  switches between straight, curved and elbow arrows — elbow is the default
  and routes around elements automatically.

• Element packs — the packs button on the board toolbar drops ready-made
  groups at the viewport centre: sticky notes, a flowchart kit
  (start → process → decision with branches), an architecture kit
  (user → service → database/queue), a SWOT matrix, C4 nodes, swimlanes and
  ✓/⚠/✗/? status stickers. The same packs are also available in the canvas
  library panel (the book icon), and the packs dialog has a button that
  restores them there if the library was cleared.

• Issue cards — link tracker issues to elements and their live status
  badges render right on the canvas; a frame of issues can be turned into
  tracker tasks in bulk.

• Export — download the board as a PNG, SVG or PDF picture, as a Mermaid
  (.mmd) or draw.io (.drawio) diagram file that keeps the shapes and
  connections editable in those tools, or as a JSON scene file.

• Import — the import button opens a searchable list of formats: you pick
  what you are bringing in and see what it will become. Built in:

  • Mermaid — paste the source or choose an .mmd file. Flowchart,
    sequence and class diagrams become editable shapes; other types (C4,
    gantt, …) land as a picture.
  • draw.io / diagrams.net — a .drawio or .xml file, compressed ones
    included: shapes, text and connections become editable.
  • Board scene (JSON) — a file produced by the board’s own export: every
    shape comes back exactly as it was.

  A plugin that adds its own format appears in the same list with a Plugin
  badge. Everything imported lands at the viewport centre as regular editable
  elements, and a single Ctrl+Z removes it.

Sheets — several drawings in one board

A board is a workbook: it can hold several sheets, switched with the tab
strip under the canvas, just like spreadsheet tabs. Keep the context diagram,
the container view, the sequence and the retro of one system together instead
of scattering them over separate boards.

• Add a sheet with the + at the left of the strip (or right-click the
  empty strip). The new tab opens straight into rename — type the name and
  press Enter.
• Rename — double-click a tab, or press F2 on a focused one.
• Right-click a tab (or Shift+F10) for the menu: rename, duplicate, move
  left / right, copy a link to the sheet, delete.
• Reorder by dragging a tab along the strip.
• Duplicate copies the sheet’s drawing into a new tab — the fast way to
  draw “before / after” variants.
• Every sheet has its own short key (WB-12), its own version history and
  its own live room, so a link to a sheet opens the board on that tab and
  teammates drawing on different sheets don’t disturb each other.
• Delete sends the sheet to the Recycle Bin with its
  history; deleting the board takes all of its sheets along, and restoring the
  board brings them all back. The first sheet is the board itself and can’t be
  removed on its own.
• Sheets are the board’s tabs, not separate boards: the board list shows one
  card per board with its sheet count.

Agents drive the same thing over MCP: whiteboard_get returns the tab strip in
sheets; whiteboard_sheet_create, whiteboard_sheet_update,
whiteboard_sheets_reorder and whiteboard_sheet_delete manage it; drawing on
a sheet is whiteboard_save_scene with the sheet’s id.

Version history

Press the clock button to open the board’s snapshot history (each sheet
keeps its own).

• Snapshots are taken automatically as people draw — at most one per author
  every five minutes, so continuous drawing doesn’t flood the history — plus
  whenever you press the bookmark (Save version) and add a note. A board
  created from a template starts with the template as v1.
• Named checkpoints carry an accent badge; autosaves are muted, so the
  milestones stand out.
• Click a snapshot to compare: the chosen version is shown side by side
  with the previous one, added elements in green, removed in red, changed in
  amber, with a +/−/~ summary. Either side can be switched — to any other
  version, to Start (empty board) or to the Current board, which answers
  “what changed since the last snapshot” in one pick. The first snapshot is
  compared with the empty board, never with itself.
• Restore this version brings the snapshot back as the current scene.
  History is append-only — a restore is itself a new snapshot, and every open
  canvas reloads the restored scene at once.

Embedding a board in the Wiki

Any board can be embedded into a wiki page with !board:<board-id> — the page
shows a live preview with an Open board link and a Draw here button that
opens the canvas inside the page. This is how architecture docs stay in sync
with the diagram.

Enabling Boards

Boards ship inside the TCM module — the same per-namespace switch as the rest of
that family enables them.