Tools

Map tools live in the tool island, a small floating toolbar docked to the left edge of the map. One tool is active at a time, it changes what a click or a drag on the canvas does, and Select is active by default. Mantis ships two map panels with different tool sets, so this page also tells you where each tool lives.

Where to find it

The tool island appears inside every Map panel. From top to bottom it holds seven tools, then a divider, then Clear and Delete, then a second divider, then Pages and Settings. Hovering a button expands its label.

Map (Legacy) (View > Exploration > Map (Legacy)) uses an older fixed tool palette in the same corner. It carries three tools the tool island does not: Journey, Waypoint and Semantic Ruler.

The tools

Tool	Shortcut	Available on
Select	I	Map, Map (Legacy)
Lasso	Q	Map, Map (Legacy)
Magic	M	Map, Map (Legacy)
Path	P	Map, Map (Legacy)
Landmark	N	Map, Map (Legacy)
Reconstruct	none	Map; Map (Legacy) only for text-embedding-ada-002 spaces
Heatmap	H	Map, Map (Legacy)
Semantic Ruler	R	Map (Legacy)
Journey	J	Map (Legacy)
Waypoint	W	Map (Legacy)
Clear	Ctrl+⌫	Map, Map (Legacy)
Delete	Ctrl+⇧+⌫	Map, Map (Legacy)

The single-letter shortcuts are bare keys, so they only fire when you are not typing into a field. They set the active tool for the whole space, which means pressing J or R while the default Map is focused selects a tool that map cannot draw with, and clicks fall back to Select behavior.

Select

Click a point to select it. Click the same point again to deselect it.

⇧-click adds and removes points one at a time. Clicking

empty canvas clears the selection. Dragging with Select active pans the map, and dragging with the right mouse button orbits the camera in 2.5D.

Clicking a cluster label focuses that cluster. If a selection tool (Lasso, Magic, Path) is active instead, clicking a cluster label selects that cluster’s entire subtree of points.

Path

Press and drag a stroke across the map. Every point within the path radius of the stroke joins the selection, which makes it the right tool for a thin ribbon of points that a lasso would over-collect. The radius is the Path Tool Radius slider in Settings (5 to 500 px, default 20); hovering that slider draws the radius on the map so you can size it against real point density.

Semantic Heatmap

Pick Heatmap, then click one point. That point becomes the anchor, and every other point on the map is recolored by the cosine similarity of its raw high-dimensional embedding to the anchor. The similarity is computed on the backend, not from the 2D positions, so the coloring will disagree with visual distance wherever the projection distorted the space. The color scale is shared with the Localized Error panel, which carries the legend. Switching away from the tool removes the coloring.

Semantic Ruler

Available on Map (Legacy) only. Click two points and Mantis reports the cosine similarity of their raw high-dimensional embeddings, drawn as a labeled line between them. This is the one tool that measures true embedding distance rather than projected distance, so it is the fastest way to check whether two points that look adjacent on the map actually are. Leaving the tool resets the measurement.

Reconstruct

Click anywhere on the map. Mantis samples the nearest points (5 by default), weights their high-dimensional embeddings by inverse squared distance from your click, and asks the backend to invert that weighted mean back into text. The result and its two controls, Passes and Sampled points, live in the Reconstruction Panel.

Heads up

Reconstruct is hidden from the Map (Legacy) palette unless the space was embedded with text-embedding-ada-002. If the button is missing from your legacy palette, the space uses a different embedding model.

Selection tools and bags

Lasso, Magic and Path all commit into the current selection, which is what the Inspector, Reader, Summarizer and the plot panels read. None of them creates a bag on their own, despite the Lasso tooltip saying “create a bag”. To save a selection, use the Bags panel.

Two modifiers change that on release:

• Hold Ctrl to add the collected points to the active bag instead of replacing the selection.
• Hold ⇧ to remove them from the active bag.Alt does the same on the default Map.

Settings also has a Selection Actions card listing the panels that open automatically when a selection meets their point and data-type requirements.

Moving the toolbar

The tool island and the floating map controls can be repositioned:

1. Open Settings from the tool island.
2. Turn on Edit mode in the Floating toolbar card. The island picks up a ring and a grab cursor, and its buttons stop responding to clicks.
3. Drag it. On release it snaps to whichever edge its center is nearest: left, right, top or bottom. Top and bottom lay the buttons out in a row.
4. Turn Edit mode off to use the tools again.

The placement is a view setting, not a per-tool one, so it persists with the rest of your view settings.

Limits

• On the default Map, a single Lasso, Magic or Path commit is capped at 25,000 points. Anything past that is dropped with no message in the UI.
• Journey, Waypoint and Semantic Ruler have not been ported to the default WebGL map. Open Map (Legacy) to use them.
• Clear and Delete take no confirmation. Read Delete Bags before you press it.

Read nextBagsWhere a selection becomes something you can name and reuse.