--- description: "Themes in Jotaid: the middle-tier container that gathers related notes — how to make one, what it looks like in each view, plus Smart Theme and theme summaries." --- # 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](https://docs.jotaid.com/en/guide/pricing) 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](https://docs.jotaid.com/en/guide/pricing) 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](https://docs.jotaid.com/en/guide/projects) — The tier above - [Tags](https://docs.jotaid.com/en/guide/tags) — Classification that cuts across every theme - [Interface Views](https://docs.jotaid.com/en/guide/canvas) — Switching between the three views