Bags
A bag is a named, colored set of points saved from a map. A selection is temporary and disappears the moment you click somewhere else; a bag does not. Bags are how you carry a group of points from the map to the rest of Mantis: the List panel opens them as tabs, the map draws them as colored rings and bubbles, and the Composer can @-mention them.
Bags belong to a map. Each open map keeps its own bag list, and the panel shows the bags of the map it is attached to.
Where to find it
View menu, Exploration section, Bags.
Creating a bag
Selecting points does not create a bag. You have to save the selection explicitly.
- Select points on the map. Use Select, Lasso, Magic Lasso or Path, or click a cluster.
- Click New bag. The button sits at the top left of the Bags panel. It stays disabled until something is selected, and shows the pending count once there is: New bag (42).
- The bag appears in the list. It takes the next unused color from a fixed 14-color palette and a default name from that color, such as
Blue 1. If your selection was exactly one cluster and no loose points, the cluster label is used as the name instead.
Three other places create a bag in one click:
- Tree: the bag icon at the right of any cluster row bags that cluster’s points.
- Categories: the bag action on a category value bags every point carrying that value.
- Map search: running a search creates a bag of the results named after the query, prefixed with a magnifier for keyword search or a crystal ball for semantic search.
Bags made these three ways arrive locked. Search bags cannot be unlocked at all.
The bag list
Each row shows a color dot, the bag name, and the point count, plus · locked when the bag is locked. Hovering the name shows the bag’s summary, which the backend writes automatically (one sentence, at most 15 words) shortly after the bag is created. There is no field for you to type your own note.
Clicking the color dot or the name toggles highlight. Highlighting enlarges that bag’s points on the map and paints them in its color; it does not change your selection. Any combination of bags can be highlighted at once, and a point belonging to several highlighted bags is drawn as concentric rings, up to three colors deep.
Hover a row to reveal its actions, right to left:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| × | Deletes this bag. No confirmation. Works even on a locked bag. |
| Lock / Unlock | Freezes the bag’s name and contents. Locked bags reject renames and additions. |
| Pencil | Renames the bag inline. Enter commits, Escape cancels. Hidden on locked bags. |
| + | Adds the current selection to this bag. Appears only when something is selected and the bag is unlocked. |
Panel toolbar
- Bubbles toggles floating labels on the map, one per bag, showing the bag’s name, count and summary with lines drawn to its points. Bubbles are drawn for every bag, not only the highlighted ones, and a bubble can be dragged to a new position.
- ∪ ∩ ∖ appear once two or more bags are highlighted. Each exports a new bag from the highlighted ones: union, intersection, or the first highlighted bag minus the rest. The source bags are left untouched.
- Clear highlights unhighlights everything. The bags themselves are unaffected.
- The trash icon deletes every bag on this map.
Editing a bag’s contents
A bag is closest to a saved snapshot. From the Bags panel you can only add to one: select points, then click + on the row.
To remove individual points, use the List panel. Highlighting a bag opens it as a List tab and makes it the active bag; every row there carries a clipboard toggle that adds or removes that single point from the active bag.
Clearing and deleting
The two bag entries in the map toolbar are easy to misread. Neither of them empties a bag.
Clear Bags (Ctrl+⌫) clears the current selection: selected points, selected clusters, and bag highlights. Every bag survives with all of its points. There is no per-bag clear anywhere in the UI.
Delete Bags destroys every bag
Delete Bags (Ctrl+⇧+⌫) is not scoped to one bag and does not ask. It deletes every bag on every open map and clears the selection. The trash icon in the Bags panel does the same for that map. Neither shows a confirmation dialog. To remove a single bag, hover its row and click the ×.
Limits
- No color picker. Colors are assigned in order from the built-in palette and cannot be changed.
- No per-bag clear, and no way to remove points from within the Bags panel.
- Locking protects a bag’s name and contents, not its existence. A locked bag can still be deleted.
- Bag summaries are generated by the backend and cannot be edited.
- Deleting a bag has no confirmation step.
Where bags live
Bags are part of the space state Mantis syncs to the backend, so they come back when you reopen the space and are visible to anyone working in the same space state.
Read nextListOpen a bag as rows and toggle individual points in or out.Read nextMagic LassoSelect a region and snap it out to the best-matching cluster.