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Undo and recovery

This page explains what MultiTaction Canvus can undo, what it cannot, and how Canvus brings back your canvases after a restart or an unexpected shutdown.

What you can undo

Canvus has one undo action, and it covers only the bulk operations in the finger menu:

  • the layout operations: grid, timeline, kanban, declutter, compact and spread;
  • the zone macros that move items: Move what I can see to a zone and Move a zone's items here;
  • Delete everything in view. Undo puts the deleted items, and the connectors between them, back on the canvas.

To undo, open the finger menu and tap Undo in either the Layout or the Macros section. Both items are the same action.

How the undo list works:

Rule What it means
10 steps Canvus keeps the last 10 of these operations. When an eleventh is added, the oldest is dropped.
Per canvas Each open canvas has its own list.
Per client The list lives on the client where you made the change. Another wall or laptop on the same shared canvas cannot undo it, but everyone sees the result when you do.
Lost on close The list is cleared when you close the canvas or quit Canvus. It is not saved with the canvas.

The delete confirmation reminds you of this: "You can undo this from the macros menu until you close the canvas."

What you cannot undo

  • There is no general undo or redo. Canvus has no undo keyboard shortcut for canvas changes, and no redo at all. Moving, resizing, editing, drawing or deleting a single item cannot be undone.
  • Copies made with the zone macros, and Pin everything in view and Unpin everything in view, are not recorded.
  • Once the canvas is closed, nothing on it can be undone.

Tip

To protect a canvas you want to keep in a known state, use a demo canvas, which saves a state you can restore later, or export the canvas to disk before a session.

Restoring the previous session

Canvus remembers which canvases were open in which workspaces, with each workspace's view position and zoom.

After a normal shutdown

When you quit Canvus normally with canvases open, the next start shows the welcome screen. Tap Restore previous session to reopen the workspaces and the canvases that were open in them, at the same view.

The button is greyed out when there is nothing to restore. Its tooltip says why:

  • "There is no previous session to restore"
  • "There is nothing to restore" (no canvas was open)
  • "Fixed workspaces have changed" (the fixed workspaces in mt-canvus.ini no longer match the saved session)
  • "Previous session was already restored"

After an unexpected shutdown

If Canvus stops unexpectedly, for example after a crash or a power cut, it reopens the workspaces and canvases that were open as soon as it starts again, without anyone tapping anything.

If that automatic restore does not complete, Canvus does not try again on the following start. It opens the welcome screen instead, so a canvas that causes a problem cannot trap the wall in a restart loop.

Note

Restore reopens canvases and views. It does not restore the undo list.

From Canvus 26.10.1, both behaviours work as described. In 26.09.1 to 26.10.0 the Restore previous session button stayed greyed out and automatic restore did not happen.