2
🗄
✓
📋
⠿
🗄
✓
tommorow📋
⠿
1
🗄
✓
beta📋
⠿
1
🗄
✓
📋
⠿
2
🗄
✓
alpha📋
⠿
🗄
✓
⠿
KanWrite
Your Handwritten Kanban Board
⌕
KanWrite is a handwriting-first kanban board. Every card is a writing surface — use your stylus or finger to write, sketch, or annotate. Typed text and handwriting can coexist on the same card. Cards live in columns, columns live on boards, and boards live in your browser — everything saves automatically.
Tap ＋ New board in the sidebar to create a board. Click its name in the board header to rename it. Each new board gets a Welcome card explaining the app.
When you put a card in the Card Box, it's automatically routed by which column it came from:
Hover a Card Box card and tap ↩ Restore to send it back to its original board.
Completing a card (swipe right, or the ✓ Complete button) sends it to the Completed 202x board, filed under the current month's column. On January 1st a new Completed 202x+1 board is auto-created. These boards are read-only — your handwriting is preserved forever. Hover a completed card to restore it to an active board.
Go to ⚙️ Settings → Delete a Board. Card Box and Completed boards are protected and cannot be deleted. Deletion is permanent — all cards on that board are lost.
Tap ✦ Write a new card at the bottom of any column. A card has two writing surfaces: the Card Face (small thumbnail shown on the board) and Full Notes (as long as you need — tap ＋ Add more room to expand). Both surfaces accept handwriting and typed text simultaneously.
Tap the T button on any writing pad to show the text layer. Type your notes — the text is rendered onto the canvas underneath. Tap T again to hide the textarea and draw on top of your typed text. Both are saved together. The card thumbnail on the board shows both your handwriting and typed text in split zones.
The Label is a short typed title that appears under the card thumbnail on the board. Tags are searchable keywords — type one and press Enter. Card Color sets the accent stripe on the left edge. Urgency controls sort order when sorting by urgency.
Open any card and scroll to the bottom of the editor. Under Move to Another Board, choose a destination board and then a column. The card is moved immediately on Save.
If a card has content in its Full Notes section (handwriting or typed text), a small 📋 icon appears on the right side of the card title row on the board. This lets you know there's more to read without opening the card.
Two pen modes are available in the drawing toolbar:
Six ink colours (navy, oxblood, deep blue, forest, brown, purple) and three nib sizes (Fine, Medium, Broad) are available in the toolbar. Your pen mode and size selection persists between cards.
Erase removes individual strokes — tap or drag over a stroke to erase it. ↶ Undo removes the last stroke drawn. Clear wipes the active pad entirely. These only affect the pad you last touched (Card Face or Full Notes).
KanWrite uses every web API available to reduce stylus latency: desynchronized canvas rendering, high-frequency pointerrawupdate events (up to 240hz), predictive ink rendering, and the Chrome Ink API for compositor-layer drawing. On a Dell Active Pen or similar, the result is the closest to native-app feel achievable in a browser.
Open any card and set a date & time in the Reminder field. When the time arrives, a toast notification appears in the app. If you've enabled browser notifications (via ⋯ → Enable reminder alerts), a system notification fires even if the app is in the background — as long as the tab is open.
Type any of these phrases into the card's Label field and the Reminder date auto-fills at 8:00am on the appropriate day:
today → today at 8amtomorrow → tomorrow at 8amsoon → 3 days from nownext week → 6 days from nowtwo weeks → 14 days from nowthree weeks → 21 days from nownext month → 30 days from nowremember → 7 days from nowThe phrase can appear anywhere in the label — "Call dentist tomorrow" works just as well as "tomorrow: dentist". If you manually edit the reminder date after it auto-fills, your manual choice is respected.
Tap the 🔔 button in the topbar to see all upcoming and overdue reminders across every board, sorted by date. Overdue reminders are highlighted in red. Tap any reminder to open that card.
Every card has a small ribbon bookmark in the top-left corner. Tap it to fill it red — the bookmark state is saved with the card. Tap 🔖 Focus in the topbar to dim all non-bookmarked cards to 18% opacity, leaving only your bookmarked cards fully interactive. Tap Focus again to restore normal view. Long-press the Focus button (hold 600ms) to clear all bookmarks across all boards after confirmation.
Tap ⇅ Sort in the topbar to activate sorting. A dropdown appears with four modes:
Tap Sort again to return to manual order.
The search box in the topbar filters cards across all columns of the current board in real time — matching against typed labels and tags. Handwritten content is not searchable (it's stored as vector strokes), so adding a typed label to handwritten cards makes them findable.
Inside the card editor: the ↓ Jump to details button in the drawing toolbar jumps to the reminders, tags, and column fields. The ↑ Top button in the footer jumps back up. Shift+↓ on a keyboard does the same as Jump to details.
KanWrite awards points for activity to help you see your own productivity at a glance. Tap the gold pts pill in the topbar to open the Points & Awards drawer.
Seven award tiers unlock as your total points climb. Each triggers a gold toast notification when first earned:
If the points system isn't your thing, uncheck Show Points & Gamification above. The gold pill disappears from the topbar and award notifications are suppressed. Your point history is preserved — you can re-enable it any time.
Permanently removes the board and all its cards. This cannot be undone.