Navigating Synap

The sidebar

The sidebar is your main way of getting around Synap. It sits on the left side of the screen and shows a compact strip of icons when collapsed. Hover over it and it expands to reveal labels and additional options.

This design keeps the sidebar out of your way when you're working, but makes it easy to navigate when you need it. You'll get used to the flow quickly — it feels natural after just a few uses.

The four core views

Synap is organized around four core views. Each one is accessible from the sidebar and gives you a different lens into your knowledge.

Dashboard

Dashboard is your home screen — it's what you see when you open the app. Think of it as your daily command center. It shows your upcoming tasks, your agenda for the day, key performance indicators, and anything that needs your attention. At a glance, you know exactly where you stand.

Mind

Mind is where you browse and view your files. It works like a file browser with a tree view on the side, so you can navigate through your zones and documents. You can open multiple files in tabs, and even split the screen to view two files side by side.

Canvas

Canvas takes you to your visual boards. This is the creative, spatial view where you can arrange cards, images, and content freely on an open surface. It's ideal for planning, brainstorming, and laying out ideas visually.

Canvas also handles prototyping. You can design and preview interface layouts — landing pages, app screens, or any visual concept — right alongside your other creative work. No separate tool, no context switching. Describe what you want in plain language and AI builds it for you instantly.

Graph

Graph shows you how your notes and documents connect to each other. It's a network visualization that reveals relationships between your ideas. You might discover that a meeting note links to a project brief, which connects to a client profile — all visible in one interactive map.

Quick Search

No matter where you are in the app, you can press Cmd+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows) to open Quick Search. A clean search panel appears in the center of the screen where you can type anything — a file name, a word, a phrase — and Synap searches across all your files instantly.

Results show the file name along with a snippet of matching content, so you can tell at a glance which one you're looking for. Each result also shows a small badge indicating which zone it comes from — Focus, Memory, or Canvas. Use the arrow keys to move through the list and press Enter to open a file. Press Escape to close the panel without leaving where you are.

Keyboard shortcuts

A few shortcuts are worth knowing early on, since they work from anywhere in the app:

Shortcut	What it does
Cmd+K / Ctrl+K	Open Quick Search
Cmd+F / Ctrl+F	Find text in the current file
Cmd+G / Ctrl+G	Jump to the next match while searching
Shift+Cmd+G / Shift+Ctrl+G	Jump to the previous match
Cmd+1, 2, 3 / Ctrl+1, 2, 3	Switch between open tabs
Cmd+W / Ctrl+W	Close the current tab (desktop only)

You don't need to memorize all of these at once — they'll become natural as you use the app.

Plugins

Below the four core views, you'll find a Plugins section in the sidebar. Plugins are additional views that extend what Synap can do — things like a Pomodoro timer, a bookmarks manager, or a business dashboard.

The Plugins section is collapsible. Click on it to expand and see your installed plugins, or collapse it to keep the sidebar clean. Don't worry about plugins for now — they're covered in detail later in the documentation.

Mind switcher

At the very bottom of the sidebar, you'll find the Mind Switcher. This is how you move between different minds. If you have separate minds for different projects or clients, the Mind Switcher lets you jump between them with a single click.

When you switch minds, the entire app updates to show the knowledge, tasks, and boards from that mind. It's like opening a completely different workspace, but without leaving the app.

Getting comfortable

You don't need to memorize any of this. As you start using Synap, the navigation will become second nature. The sidebar is always there when you need it, and every view is just one click away.

In the next sections, we'll dive deeper into each zone and view so you can make the most of everything Synap has to offer.