3. Shapes and stencils

The catalogue#

68 shape kinds in total: 29 core kinds and 39 stencil kinds.

The shape palette (left panel → Shapes, or the toolbar drop-down) groups 25 of the core kinds:

Group	Kinds
Flowchart	start, process, decision, gate, data, store, document, end, stop
UML	actor, fragment, component
Architecture	plane, lane, group, cloud, database, queue, person
Basic	rect, card, ellipse, triangle, text, note

The other four core kinds are produced by other tools rather than the palette: lifeline and activation (sequence diagrams, mostly from the bundled figures), image (drop a picture) and icon (place an icon).

Three ways to place one:

Drag the swatch onto the canvas.
Click the swatch to arm it, then click the canvas.
Command palette → Insert process, Insert decision, …

Whichever you use, the new shape is selected and its inline editor is open, so you can type immediately.

Stencil libraries#

Left panel → Stencils, or Assets ▸ Stencils, or the palette command Stencils: open the library. Everything is searchable by name and keyword.

Library	Kinds	Contents
BPMN 2.0	14	start / intermediate / end events, task, sub-process, the four gateways, data object, data store, pool, lane, annotation
UML	7	class, interface, package, component, actor, use case, note
ERD	3	entity, weak entity, relationship
Network	14	infrastructure and topology shapes
Data	1	`table`

Stencil shapes are ordinary nodes with a stencil kind, so everything else in the app — morphing, styling, routing, export, the AI layer — treats them like any other shape. Because the theme has no entry for these kinds, dropping one also applies the stencil's default style.

Some stencils are content driven: the node's body text is the model.

umlClass renders compartments from the body.
table keeps its grid in meta.table and draws a live column overlay you can drag.
ERD entities render one attribute row per body line (see the ERD walkthrough).

Changing a shape's kind (morphing)#

Right-click → Change shape, or the Inspector's shape grid. Text, size, position, style overrides, layer, parent and every connected edge survive: only the outline changes. The morph grid offers the core kinds and every stencil kind.

Icons#

Left panel → Icons. 201 icons are bundled (Lucide, Tabler and Simple Icons — see src/assets/icons/LICENSES.md). If a search matches nothing locally the panel can query the public Iconify API; nothing from Iconify is bundled, and the single icon you pick is inlined into the document when you place it.

An icon node draws the glyph with the label underneath and no outline.

Images#

Left panel → Images: drop files, pick them, or fetch a URL. Images are stored as data URIs on the document, so an exported JSON is self-contained and the single-file build keeps working offline.

Remove background runs a local segmentation model over the selected image or icon node. It is a real download the first time and it is not available in the single-file build.

Right-click an image for its fit mode and Replace picture.

Figures and saved diagrams#

Left panel → Figures: the 31 bundled Plota A9 figures (460 nodes and 353 edges between them), converted with their semantic structure intact — decisions are decision nodes, sequence messages are edges between lifelines, swimlane children are parented to their lane. Below them, My diagrams lists whatever you have saved with Ctrl/⌘ S.

Assets: one search over everything#

The Assets button in the toolbar, or the Assets tab, searches shapes, stencils, icons, document images, named styles, bundled figures and saved diagrams together, with what you used most recently pinned at the top. Every hit is draggable onto the canvas, and clicking one places it at the centre of the view.