User Guide

Anahera Aloft is a Chrome extension that captures the web pages you browse and places them onto a spatial canvas visible in the browser's side panel. When you need more room, the ⤢ button opens the full Anahera canvas in a dedicated tab at anahera.space.

Pages are not saved to a list or bookmarked — they become heat-bearing artifacts that cluster together, drift toward related content, and fade when you stop visiting them. The canvas is not a UI you fill in — it is a place you inhabit.

Click the Anahera feather icon in the Chrome toolbar to open the side panel. On your very first open, a consent prompt asks whether you want auto-capture turned on — you can answer either way and change your mind later.

The panel header sits at the top — auto-capture toggle on the left, theme and expand buttons on the right. The rest of the panel is your canvas.

Two ways to add a page. They behave differently — choose based on whether you want automatic domain clustering or immediate placement.

Auto-capture watches how long you stay on a page. When you spend 30 seconds or more on a page, it is queued to the extension badge counter — not added to the canvas directly. Open the full canvas to see the inbox dialog and approve items from there.

The panel header has three controls, always visible once the canvas loads:

The teal number on the toolbar icon tells you how many items need attention.

The badge updates in real time. The count drops as you approve or dismiss items through the inbox in the full canvas.

Press ⤢ in the panel header to open your canvas in a full browser tab at anahera.space. The canvas is identical — same heat map, same clusters, same inbox — without the narrow side panel column.

When a full-canvas tab is open, it updates the badge count even when the side panel is closed. The extension content script running on that tab relays the inbox count to the toolbar badge in the background.

For each page — whether auto-captured or a manual clip — Anahera collects only: page URL, page title, favicon URL, and dwell time. Anything else on a card is a note you write yourself.

That is the complete list. Anahera reads no page content at all — no meta description, no page body HTML, no form inputs, no passwords, no cookies.

Captured data is transferred in-browser via postMessage to the Anahera canvas — it never travels over the network. It is stored in your browser's localStorage only and never leaves your device. The extension sends no analytics or telemetry of any kind.

The following pages are permanently excluded from capture — auto or manual:

Auto-capture is always paused in incognito windows, regardless of your setting. When you have the panel open and switch to an incognito tab, a yellow notice — "auto-capture paused · incognito" — appears at the top of the panel.

Switching back to a regular tab dismisses the notice and resumes auto-capture if it was enabled.

The canvas is a continuous space rendered in WebGL. Artifacts (captured pages, notes, URLs) exist as cards with spatial positions. They drift over time based on affinity — pages visited close together in time develop a gravitational pull toward each other and form clusters.

You navigate the canvas the same way you would a map: scroll to zoom, click and drag to pan. Items that haven't been touched in a while grow cold and drift toward the periphery; revisiting them pulls them back in.

Every artifact has a heat value between 0 and 1. Heat is driven entirely by recency of interaction — it peaks when you visit or capture a page and decays automatically over time. You cannot set heat manually. Heat decay speed is adjustable in Settings.

Clusters form automatically when pages are visited within 30 seconds of each other — that co-usage creates an affinity edge between them. As edges accumulate, groups of related artifacts naturally cohere into a cluster. Each cluster gets a color identity and a centroid marker. Cards drift toward their cluster's centroid based on recency: recently visited cards stay warm and close, older ones cool and settle further out.

A Node is a user-placed landmark. Press N with your cursor over an empty area to place one — give it a name and an emoji. Nodes are the only elements on the canvas you place by hand — everything else (clusters, edges, filaments) emerges from your browsing.

Nodes are fixed spatial anchors: clusters dock to them, filaments tether toward them, and they stay visible at every zoom level. Double-tapping a node flies the camera to it and opens a detail panel with its clusters listed. Pressing A fits all nodes into view and flashes them.

Drag a cluster centroid near a Node to dock it. The cluster's center locks to the Node's position and travels with it when the Node is dragged. To undock, delete the node with Delete while it is selected.

Beyond capturing pages via the extension, you can add content directly while on the canvas:

The canvas adapts what it shows to how close you are. Each zoom level reveals a different layer of detail:

Auto-captured pages wait in the inbox until you review them. The inbox is a triage queue: approve pages to send them to the canvas, or dismiss them to remove without adding.

• Open the inbox: press Shift+I, or click the badge on the toolbar button when items are pending.
• Each item shows the page title, domain, favicon, and when it was captured.
• Select any combination — approve them to the canvas, or dismiss to remove.
• Approving a batch closes the inbox and flies the camera to where they landed. The teal badge count drops as you work through the queue.

The Wayfinding Bar is an always-visible "Jump to…" search field at the top of the canvas. Typing filters your nodes, clusters, and card/page titles — click a result to fly the camera there.

The Chrono Slider is the timeline bar at the bottom of the canvas. Dragging it left scrubs backward through your canvas history — you see the canvas as it looked at any point in the past 30 minutes (1,800 snapshots at 1-second resolution).

Historical playback is read-only. The canvas tints amber to signal you are in historical mode. Releasing the slider returns to the live canvas without affecting any of your artifacts.

Tune the visual weight of every layer on the canvas. Three presets cover most needs — or build your own with per-layer sliders. Settings persist across sessions.

Per-layer sliders let you adjust: cards, field contours, ambient glow, filaments, affinity links, cluster edges, and the background independently.

Open Settings with Ctrl+, from anywhere on the canvas.