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Regions & auto-layout

Two tools for making a board look like what it means: regions for deliberate grouping, and auto-layout for when the assistant has just dropped forty nodes in a heap.

Regions​

A Region is a coloured rectangle that sits behind other nodes. It has a label, a colour and a border style and nothing else - it carries no data and the AI ignores it. Its purpose is visual: "everything in this box is about the Cyprus entities".

Creating one​

  • Context panel → Quick actions → Region, or Shift+G. A small form asks for an optional label and a colour from a preset palette, then the region appears at the centre of your view.

Working with regions​

  • Resize by dragging its edges or corners; move by dragging its body.
  • Nodes whose centre lies inside the region are considered contained. Moving the region moves them; auto-layout leaves both the region and its contents where they are.
  • Regions render behind other nodes so they never obscure content. Overlapping regions are allowed but rarely helpful.
  • Select a region and press Delete to remove it; contained nodes are untouched.

Regions versus narratives​

Use a region when proximity on the canvas is the point - a workspace for one line of inquiry, a "to verify" pen, a parking lot. Use a narrative when membership is the point and you want status, summaries, AI suggestions and sync. A node can be in a region and in several narratives.

Auto-layout​

The auto-organize button in the bottom-left controls rearranges the board:

  1. Connected nodes are laid out as a graph, top to bottom. Nodes that link heavily to each other are kept together as communities; a force-directed pass then spaces them so edges cross as little as possible.
  2. RSS Feed nodes and their articles are arranged as a compact grid around the feed, since a feed with sixty articles would otherwise dominate the graph.
  3. Unconnected nodes are grouped by type and placed in rows to the side, left to right.
  4. A final pass removes any overlaps, using each node's real rendered size (collapsed nodes take less room).
  5. Regions and the nodes inside them are not moved. Pin anything you have arranged by hand inside a region before you auto-layout.

If more than one node is selected, only the selection (and the connections between selected nodes) is laid out; the rest of the board stays put. This is the way to tidy the cluster the assistant just created without disturbing your own arrangement.

Auto-layout is a single undoable step - Ctrl/Cmd+Z puts everything back.

Tips​

  • Collapse-all before auto-organizing a dense board; the result is tighter and expanding nodes afterwards rarely causes overlap because sizes are re-checked on expand.
  • The assistant places new nodes near the nodes they connect to, or in a free area of the viewport. Give it a region as a hint: "put the new actors inside the Board members region".
  • Colour is a cheap signal. Regions in a muted colour with a label in the top-left read like chapter headings when zoomed out.