The Relationship Map Is Also a Whiteboard

In one line: how to use a relationship map as a whiteboard — marquee-select a whole faction, line things up on guides, drop text straight onto the canvas, and do all of it on a phone.

What problem it solves

Relationship Map covers the basics: drop nodes, draw edges, circle groups. But once a map holds thirty things, the hard part is no longer adding — it's tidying. Four factions need to line up. A whole cluster has to shift right. That last move needs undoing.

The 4.0 canvas was rebuilt for exactly that. Three kinds of thing live on it:

• Nodes — circles, usually one character, in small, medium or large.
• Cards — a filled box with a border, good for a line of worldbuilding or an unanswered question.
• Text — no box, just words, for a heading or a margin note.

All three take the same handling: select, align, copy, undo.

The rail on the left

A vertical toolbar floats at the middle of the canvas's left edge, in three groups top to bottom:

1. Pan canvas (H), Select (V), Text box (T)
2. Zoom in, current level, zoom out, Zoom to fit
3. Undo and Redo

• The middle button shows the current zoom level. Click it to reset to 100%.
• The bottom one, Zoom to fit, pulls the whole map back into the window. Map scattered, node missing? Press that first.
• Zoom runs from 25% to 200%, and the scroll wheel zooms too.
• Whatever tool is active, middle-click and drag always pans. So does holding Space and dragging.

There's an export button in the top-right corner too — that belongs to Export and share a relationship map.

Move a whole faction at once

Switch to the Select tool (V) and drag a box across empty canvas. Anything the box touches gets selected — the node only has to be clipped, not fully enclosed.

• Hold Shift while you drag to add to the selection instead of replacing it.
• Ctrl/⌘-click nodes one at a time to add them; click again to drop one.
• Drag any node in the selection and the whole set moves, keeping its internal spacing.
• Delete removes the lot.
• Ctrl+G turns the selection into a group. You need at least two nodes; with one, Slima tells you to select more first.

Alignment guides

While you drag a node, if its centre line or any of its edges lands within five pixels of another node's, it snaps — and a guide line appears showing which line it caught.

Five pixels on purpose: past that, nothing interferes. Put it crooked if you want it crooked. No magnet you can't shake off.

Because it compares centre / left / right and centre / top / bottom, things of different sizes still line up — a large protagonist node and a card can share a left edge.

Undo, redo, copy, paste

Action	Keys
Undo	Ctrl+Z
Redo	Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y
Copy	Ctrl+C
Paste	Ctrl+V
Duplicate in place	Ctrl+D

• Undo remembers fifty steps. Moving something, renaming it, recolouring it, making a group, deleting an edge — every content change counts as one.
• Zoom and pan are not in the history. Undo won't yank your viewpoint back, because changing your view isn't changing the map.
• Switch files and the history resets. You can't undo a move from map A onto map B.
• Copy uses the relationship map's own scratch area. It doesn't touch your system clipboard — the paragraph you were about to paste is safe — and it works across .map files. Edges with both ends inside the selection come along too.
• Each paste offsets a little, so duplicates don't stack on one coordinate.

Put words straight on the canvas

Three ways:

1. Text — press T, click empty canvas, and the cursor is already waiting there. When you're done it switches back to the pan tool, so a stray click can't scatter a row of empty boxes.
2. Card — right-click empty canvas → Add Card. Filled and bordered, good for a line of worldbuilding or a question you haven't answered.
3. Drag a note in — pull a note out of the notes panel and drop it on the canvas. It becomes a card titled after the note, and the same note won't land on the same map twice.

A text box you leave empty deletes itself, so you never end up with invisible clutter. To change the words, double-click the text box or card.

A group is computed from its members

You don't draw the group box. Slima fits it to where the members are — which is why it grows and shrinks on its own and always wraps the people inside. You never drag its edges.

• Add someone: drag a node into the box. As it crosses the boundary the box turns green to say "drop here and it joins."
• Take someone out: hover a node inside a group and a red × appears at its top-right. Click it and the node leaves the box.
• Nesting: a group can sit inside another group — a bureau split into two camps, say.
• Rename and recolour: double-click the group to open a small panel, then click the name on it to turn it into a field. Enter confirms, Esc cancels. Nodes work the same way: double-click a circular node to rename it, pick a size (S/M/L) and pick a colour.
• Deleting asks whether you want Delete Group Only (people and edges stay) or Delete All.

A node named after a file is a link to it

Nothing to bind, nothing to configure: any text on the canvas that matches a file's name is a link to that file. A node reading "Shen Yan" with a Characters/Shen Yan.md in the tree points at that draft.

Ctrl/⌘-click it to open the file. Right-clicking the node also offers Open File.

When you drag a character file onto the canvas the node is named after the file anyway, so the link just happens. The flip side is the same fact: rename the node to something else and the link is gone.

When things end up on top of each other

Open a map and if Slima finds elements overlapping, a notice appears — "N overlaps found" — with an Auto-arrange button. Nothing moves until you press it. Not interested? Press Got it.

The tidying is deliberately conservative:

• It nudges apart only the pieces that actually overlap. It never re-lays-out the whole map — your spatial memory matters more than neatness.
• Group boxes are refitted only when their own members no longer fit.
• Edges and their labels can't move by themselves; the only way to move one is to move the nodes at its ends.

On a very large map it will say plainly how many overlaps still need a manual nudge, rather than pretending it solved them all.

It works on a phone

A phone has no right-click, so the rail gets one extra button at the top: ＋. It opens exactly the same menu as right-click, anchored to the middle of the canvas — so whatever you add lands somewhere you can see.

• Long-press for half a second is the right-click. On a node it opens the node menu; on empty canvas, the canvas menu. Move your finger more than a hair and it counts as a drag instead.
• One finger on a node drags the node; on empty canvas it pans.
• Two fingers zoom.

Notes

• A .map doesn't count toward your manuscript word count. However many nodes you add, your word goal stays honest.
• If the file's contents can't be read, Slima says so and refuses to overwrite it — restore it from version history.
• Zoom and position are saved with the file, so it reopens on the view you left.
• AI can edit this map too, through twelve field-level tools, and every change waits in place on a dashed card for you to accept or skip. Position is content, not layout — moving a node is its own reviewable change, and a group's box is always computed from its members, so the AI can't hand you box coordinates. See Reviewing AI edits.

Related

• Docs: Relationship Map: Draw Your Characters' Connections — nodes, edges and groups, the basics.
• Docs: Export and share a relationship map — PNG, SVG, source file, and what a reader sees.
• Docs: File tree overview — where a .map is created, and where you drag character files in from.
• Docs: Keyboard shortcuts, Mobile gestures.