Prototype Canvas

Prototype canvas

A local tldraw app that discovers every .html file under mockups/canvases/<slug>/ and renders it as a shape. There is no shape map to edit and no code change needed to add a board.

The app ships with this plugin and is installed outside your project. Your boards stay in your project. sp-canvas joins the two, so upgrading the plugin replaces the app and never touches a board you wrote.

Start

sp-canvas start

Not found? sp-canvas installs separately from the plugin, which cannot run an installer of its own: uv tool install "git+https://github.com/ReScienceLab/super-prototyping#subdirectory=tools".

That is the whole thing. It finds the bundled app, installs its dependencies on first run, boots the dev server on 127.0.0.1:5173, waits for the port to actually bind, and prints the address.

• Boards default to ./mockups/canvases under the current directory. Point somewhere else with --canvases DIR or PROTOTYPING_CANVASES_DIR.
• Port with --port N. A port that already answers is never reused: it may be another project's canvas, so start refuses rather than showing you the wrong boards.
• Two projects can run two canvases. Everything is keyed by port — the session name, the log, the pidfile — so a second start on a free port leaves the first one alone. stop and status take --port for the same reason, and stop only ever kills the canvas it started.
• sp-canvas root prints which copy of the app it found — and with -v, everywhere it looked. The first thing to run when the canvas is not what you expected.
• Deep-link a page with ?canvas=<slug>, e.g. http://127.0.0.1:5173/?canvas=notion-ios, and one board of it with #<file> after that, e.g. ?canvas=notion-ios#02-search-ask-ai: it opens in the inspector with the camera on it. Give the board link when pointing at one screen.

Keep it on loopback. This is a local design tool, not a service to expose.

A project with no boards yet opens on a notice naming the directory the canvas resolved, rather than an empty grid: an empty boards folder and a canvas pointed at the wrong one look identical otherwise.

A folder created after boot appears on its own. The dev server watches the boards directory and rebuilds its index when a board folder or file is added or removed. Rewriting a board reloads the page onto the new version, so a generator can be re-run with the canvas open. If a ?canvas=<slug> link still matches no page, the folder has no .html file in it yet — an empty folder is not a board.

The styles panel is hidden by default; toggle it from the toolbar. Always-snap is on by default. The setting is per browser, so turning it off in tldraw's preferences menu sticks.

Boards

One folder under the boards directory = one tldraw page; one .html file = one shape. Switch with the page menu at the top-left; do not build a separate switcher. references/layout.md has the layout.json schema, the caption rules, and the 478 × 980 / sandbox constraints every artboard lives under.

After editing layout.json, press the refresh button in the top bar, next to the … actions menu. Shape creation is idempotent. It fills in what is missing but never moves a shape that already exists, so inserting or reordering a row entry leaves the old shape at its old position, overlapping the new one. Force-refresh deletes every canvas-file / canvas-row-heading / canvas-file-label shape on all pages and rebuilds them from the current files. Content-only edits to a placed file do not need it: the dev server reloads the canvas onto the rewritten board.

Drive the canvas

Prefer the bounded window.snapCanvas bridge over mouse-coordinate automation or exposing tldraw's full Editor.

window.snapCanvas.describe()
window.snapCanvas.dispatch({ op: 'get' })
window.snapCanvas.dispatch({ op: 'create', shapes: [{
  type: 'text', x: 80, y: 80,
  props: { richText: { type: 'doc', content: [
    { type: 'paragraph', content: [{ type: 'text', text: 'Note' }] }] } },
}]})
window.snapCanvas.dispatch({ op: 'select', ids: ['shape:example'] })
window.snapCanvas.dispatch({ op: 'zoom',   ids: ['shape:example'] })
window.snapCanvas.dispatch({ op: 'undo' })

Call describe() before generating commands, and use the ids and bounds that get returns. Never guess screen coordinates. Batch related shape changes into one dispatch.

Never let bridge commands inject arbitrary JavaScript, never load untrusted HTML into a board, and never add allow-same-origin to the artboard iframe.

Annotated screenshots

The review loop is a screenshot of the canvas with notes drawn on it, pasted into chat. Boxes, arrows or numbers all work, from tldraw's own draw/text tools or any image annotator.

1. Treat each annotation as an exact visual target, and say back what you read it as ("box 2: tighten the card gap") before touching anything.
2. Read the surrounding UI and the HTML source before editing.
3. Make the smallest source change that satisfies it.
4. Let the canvas reload, then verify the same region visually.

Do not build an annotation-to-agent protocol. The screenshot is the bridge.

State and persistence

The document lives in the browser's IndexedDB under PERSISTENCE_KEY in the app's src/App.tsx. A board's identity is its path key, so renaming a folder or a file orphans that board's shapes; the refresh button rebuilds them. Ordinary layout drift is what refresh is for, not a persistence-key bump.

Working on the canvas app itself

Only when changing the app, not when using it. sp-canvas root prints the checkout to work in.

cd "$(sp-canvas root)/canvas"
bun run lint && bun run test && bun run build

Then, in a fresh browser session: each board page loads with its frames, headings and captions; the frames stay independently selectable; the styles panel starts hidden and toggles; the top-bar refresh button rebuilds a board cleanly.

Board discovery is a generated module, not an import.meta.glob — see the prototyping-canvases plugin in canvas/vite.config.ts. Bump PERSISTENCE_KEY only when a change would leave existing documents inconsistent with the code, such as a shape's props changing shape; a bump discards every persisted hand-drawn annotation.