Creating & Sharing

Creating a canvas

A canvas is created from NEXUS's own interface — a "New Canvas" action is available from the sidebar's own creation menu and from the canvas list itself. The person who creates a canvas is its owner from the moment it exists: the highest role on the ladder, immediately, with no separate step to claim it. See Roles & Permissions for what owner and every role below it can do.

Creating one selects it and shows it immediately, with a default title you can rename at any time. If nothing else in the workspace has that title yet, it's used as-is; otherwise a numeric suffix keeps it unique.

Nothing in the canvas_* tool family creates a new canvas. canvas_create_elements adds elements to a canvas that already exists — it does not bring one into existence. An agent's involvement with a canvas always starts with one a human has already created, in a workspace that agent is already part of.

What "sharing" means here

There's no invite flow, no link to send, and no separate share dialog. A canvas is visible to everyone and everything already scoped to the same workspace — every session, every connected agent — the moment it's created. That's what workspace scoping buys you: shared visibility is a property of being in the same workspace, not something you grant canvas-by-canvas.

Visibility is not the same as permission, though. Being in the workspace is what lets an agent see a canvas exists at all (via canvas_list); it says nothing about what that agent may do to it. That's the role ladder's job, and there is no default role — see Roles & Permissions for how that plays out in practice, including the fact that no tool call or in-app control grants a role in the current release.

Where a canvas shows up while you work

A pane in your grid can hold a live, read-only preview of a canvas — badged CANVAS · READ-ONLY — alongside your terminals and bit pages. It's a way to keep an eye on a canvas without dedicating a whole window to it, and the one action available from it is a single button that hands off to the real, editable canvas elsewhere. That hand-off matters because the editable canvas itself is not yet something you can split into its own pane in the same grid — it's a separate, dedicated view, not one more pane among the terminals. See Window & Panes for how a canvas preview fits alongside everything else that can occupy a pane.

Format and portability

A canvas's scene is Excalidraw-compatible: fields NEXUS doesn't model pass through unchanged, so a scene you export opens in Excalidraw, and one you bring back in keeps everything it had. See Explanation: Canvas Model for why this was the starting point rather than a format invented from scratch.

Where to go next

• Roles & Permissions — the ladder, and what granting one actually requires today.
• Canvas Roles — the full role and outcome contract.
• MCP Tools — the exact canvas_* tool list.
• Driving the Canvas from an Agent — once a role exists, actually making a change.