How to use ClipSpaces

ClipSpaces is an infinite canvas for collecting what matters — links, images, notes, and now diagrams — and making sense of it. Everything works locally in your browser out of the box; sign in to sync across devices.

Getting started

Open the app and you land on a blank canvas called a space. Paste a link, drop an image, or press ⌘K to ask AI — the empty board shows quick actions to get you going. Pan by dragging the canvas, and zoom with your scroll wheel or trackpad.

Spaces

A space is one canvas. Use the space pill in the top-left to switch between spaces, rename them, or create a new one. Each space keeps its own cards, connections, and drawings. Deleting a space removes its contents from this device.

Adding content

There are three ways to put things on the canvas:

• Paste (⌘V) — a URL becomes a rich link card, an image becomes an image card, and plain text becomes a text card. Many links unfurl into richer cards automatically.
• Drag & drop — drop image files, PDFs, or other files straight onto the canvas; each lands where you drop it.
• The toolbar — the bar at the bottom adds text, sticky notes, stickers, images, and links by hand.

Cards ClipSpaces recognizes specially include:

• Links — title, description, and preview image.
• YouTube / Vimeo / Loom — embedded, playable video.
• Figma & Spotify — live embeds.
• GitHub repos — stars, forks, language, open issues.
• Maps — paste a Google Maps link or add a place by name.
• Notion pages — when Notion is connected (see below).

Right-click the canvas for the full add menu, or right-click a card to open, copy, duplicate, reorder, or delete it.

Connecting cards

Hover a card and drag from one of the dots on its edges to another card to draw a connection. Connections attach to whichever side you start and end on, and they’re saved with the board. Hover a connection and click the ✕ to remove it.

Diagramming

Beyond collecting, ClipSpaces builds diagrams — flow charts, data pipelines, and software architecture — natively on the same canvas.

Shapes

Open the Shapes menu in the toolbar to drop flowchart and architecture primitives: process boxes, decision diamonds, start/end pills, input/output parallelograms, database cylinders, service components, and queues. Double-click a shape to label it, and drag its corners to resize. Add a Frame to group related shapes under a title.

Animated connectors

Connect shapes like any cards, then switch a connection to animated to show flow direction — ideal for data pipelines. Connections can carry a label and an arrowhead, and you can recolor them.

Freehand drawing

Turn on Draw mode for a pen, highlighter, basic shapes, and arrows you sketch freely over the canvas, plus an eraser. Drawings live in the canvas coordinate space, so they pan and zoom with everything else.

Ask Clip AI

Press ⌘K or click Ask Clip AI to open the assistant. It scans the current space, briefs you on what’s there, and answers questions about your board — reasoning over your cards and how they connect. Bring your own provider and model (OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, or a self-hosted OpenAI-compatible endpoint) in Clip AI settings; your key is encrypted at rest.

It can also find things on the web for you. Ask it to look something up — “find me three articles about local-first apps” — and the results arrive as real link cards, with previews, exactly as if you’d pasted them yourself. Ask a follow-up and it reads the pages it just added.

Let AI edit your board

Clip AI doesn’t just answer questions — ask it to build something and it will. “Turn these notes into a flowchart”, “group these by theme”, “add a sticky summarising each link”. It can create notes, sticky notes, diagram shapes, frames, links, images and maps, draw the connections between them, and tidy the whole arrangement.

It also edits what’s already there rather than replacing it — rewording a sticky, renaming a frame, relabelling a connection, resizing a card. The card keeps its place and everything joined to it stays joined.

Every change is a normal edit, so ⌘Z undoes it like anything else. If you ask it to clear a whole space, it asks you to confirm first.

Sharing & live collaboration

Signed in, use Share to invite people by email as viewers or editors. Everyone in a shared space sees live cursors and changes in real time. Signed out, ClipSpaces can share a live board with another person on the same network — they co-edit with you until the session ends.

Integrations

Connect Notion from Integrations to import a page as a preview card (double-click to read it inline) or export a space to a new Notion page. More integrations are planned.

Connect an external AI

You can let an AI assistant you already use — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or anything else that speaks MCP — read and edit your spaces from wherever you work. Point it at /api/mcp on your ClipSpaces instance and it will walk you through connecting.

You choose exactly which spaces it can reach. A space you don’t tick stays invisible to it, even though it’s yours — and if you only grant reading, it can look but not touch. Editing is a separate permission you have to allow deliberately.

Edits from a connected app appear on your canvas live, the same way a collaborator’s do. Clearing an entire space is the one thing an external app can’t do — that always has to be you, in the app.

Everything you’ve connected is listed under Settings → Connectors → Connected apps, showing which spaces each one can reach and when it last used them. Disconnect any of them there and its access stops immediately.

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