Themes

A theme is the middle tier: a group of related notes forming one direction. Think of a chapter in a book — not "which folder is it in" but "these belong to the same thread".

A theme is itself a note. It has a body of its own, where you can write that direction's overview, your conclusions, the open questions — while also acting as a container that notes go into.

Creating a Theme

Way	How
Shortcut	⌘T (macOS)
From the canvas	Theme view → the THEMES sub-page → new
From a note	Right-click → Convert to Theme, and that note becomes the container
Let the AI	Smart Theme (below)

It goes the other way too: an empty theme can be right-clicked → Convert to Note.

What It Looks Like in Each View

One theme, three forms:

View	What it is
Note	A filter; when active, a clickable theme header appears atop the list
Theme (canvas)	A labelled border enclosing its cards
Node	The concepts that group shares — what these notes are collectively about

Grouping on the Canvas

A theme appears on the canvas as a labelled border. To group a note, drag its card inside that border; releasing adds it.

The feedback while dragging is explicit:

• The border highlights as a card enters it — the rule being the highlighted one is the one it joins when you let go
• Dragging a card out puts slight tension on the border, with haptic feedback, so you know you are crossing a boundary

Adjusting the Width

A theme's border width is not set directly — how wide the box is follows from how many columns the cards sit in. So "adjusting the width" really means "changing the number of columns", and it snaps a card-width at a time:

• macOS: an invisible hot zone at the bottom-right corner of the box; the pointer turns into a resize cursor, and dragging re-flows the cards live
• iOS: a visible dot at that corner (touch has no hover to probe with). Tap it for −/+ to step column by column, or drag directly — dragging shows a ghost frame and the column count

macOS lets you go all the way to a single row; the iOS stepper stops at nine columns.

Tidy Up

Arranged by hand, a board drifts. Tidy Up re-flows it while preserving your groupings:

• Each theme gets a horizontal band of its own — its label on one line, its cards in a compact grid beneath
• Loose, ungrouped cards are laid out in rows by sticky-note colour
• The layout anchors to the top-left of the current content, so nothing jumps off screen

It will not undo the column count you dragged out: Jotaid infers the columns from how the cards currently sit and keeps them. Only when the arrangement is too scattered to read a column structure from does it fall back to the compact default.

Run it inside a theme and it tidies all of that theme's cards — searching or filtering changes what you see, not what gets tidied.

Smart Theme

When you cannot tell how many groups there should be, let the AI look: Smart Theme scans the current project's notes and proposes themes with their members, which you accept one by one.

It needs Pro and an API key. Model context limits mean projects beyond roughly 30 cards are sampled semantically rather than analysed whole — the results page says how much this run covered.

If accepting leaves empty themes behind, Delete Empty Themes in the toolbar clears them in one go.

Theme Summary

A theme note carries a Theme Summary button: the AI reads every note under that theme and writes a summary back into the theme note's body. Good for closing out a direction.

Also needs Pro and an API key.

Dissolving a Theme

Deleting a theme asks what to do with its contents:

• Dissolve — removes only the container; child notes are promoted to the parent and nothing is lost
• Delete all — the notes go to the trash with it

Dissolve is the default action rather than delete, because what you almost always want to undo is the grouping, not the notes.

Pro and the Canvas

In the Inbox and unlocked projects the canvas is fully interactive. In a project that needs Pro it becomes read-only: you can still zoom, pan and open notes to read, but moving cards, regrouping or editing prompts you to unlock. Either way, your notes stay visible.

Next Steps

• Projects — The tier above
• Tags — Classification that cuts across every theme
• Interface Views — Switching between the three views