Glossary
The vocabulary Mantis uses, in one tight definition each. Four words carry most of the weight: a space holds your data, a map lays it out, a point is one row, and a bag is a set of points you saved. Everything else is built from those.
Data and structure
Space. The container for a body of work. A space has a name, an owner, an optional alias used in its URL, a public or private flag, and one or more maps. Deleting or sharing happens at the space level. See Create your first space.
Map. One arrangement of one dataset: points laid out in two dimensions so that nearness means similarity. A space can hold several maps, over the same dataset or different ones. Each map carries its own field types, statistics and visibility flag. See Map.
Point. One row of your data drawn as one dot. A point carries its title, its original columns, its embedding, and the cluster it belongs to.
Cluster. A group of points the synthesis pipeline found together. Clusters are hierarchical, so a cluster contains sub-clusters down to individual points. See Tree.
Contour. A density outline drawn around clusters on the map. It is a map overlay you turn on and off, not a selection.
Floor. Legacy. Points still carry a floor_number that defaults to 1, and CSV ingestion still accepts a connection column described as “link to previous floor”, but there is no floor switcher, no floor creation and no floor keyboard shortcut in the shipped app. Read map wherever older material says floor. See Spaces and maps.
Selecting and grouping
Selection. The points currently active in a map. Most panels render the current selection, so an empty panel usually means an empty selection.
Bag. A named set of points you saved from a selection. Bags persist with the space and are how a selection travels between panels and into the Composer. See Bags.
Hashtag. A short free-text tag you attach to the selected points from the map. Press H with points selected to open the tag input. See HashTags.
Keyword. A salient term or phrase Mantis extracted from your documents and linked to clusters and points. Keywords are computed, not authored. See Keywords.
Places and paths
Landmark. A note pinned to a location on the map. Press N to place one. See Landmark.
Waypoint. A saved state of the space you can return to and share with others. Press W. See Waypoints.
Journey. An ordered path through points, used to walk a space in sequence. Press J. See Journeys.
Vignette. A saved, shareable view of a set of points with its own access control: anyone with the link, unlisted, or private. See Vignettes.
The math underneath
Embedding. The high-dimensional vector Mantis computes for each row from the columns you marked as text. Similarity between points is really similarity between embeddings. See Embeddings and projection.
Reduction. The step that takes those embeddings down to the coordinates the map draws. Reduction always targets 2 dimensions. The 2.5D toggle changes how those two coordinates are rendered, not how many there are.
Projection. Mapping new text into an existing map’s coordinate system, so a sentence you type lands where it belongs among points that already exist. See Projection.
Outbedding. A backend research term for generating new material out of latent coordinates. It is not a user-facing feature: no panel, menu item or control in Mantis is called an outbedding. Ignore it unless you are reading backend source.
The workspace
Panel. One tool in the workspace, opened from the View menu. Panels are docked tabs, and most of them read the current selection. See Panel index.
Tabset. A group of docked panel tabs sharing one rectangle of the screen. Panel navigation shortcuts move focus between tabsets and cycle tabs within one. See Panels and layouts.
Layout preset. A saved arrangement of panels. The View menu ships platform presets and lets you save your own, and space owners can set one as the default for a space from File > Set Default Layout.
Point action. A panel that offers to open itself when your selection matches its conditions, for example Inspect Point at one point or Summarize Selection at two or more. Some are on by default (Inspect, Summarize) and the rest are off until you enable them.
Automating and extending
Macro. A recorded or authored sequence of Mantis actions that an agent or you can replay. Macros are written in the Macro Editor, run in the Macro Runner, and published in the Macro Marketplace. See Macro editor.
Extension. A packaged bundle that adds panels, commands and optional Python backend code to Mantis without changing the core app. Extensions are installed into a workspace and run sandboxed. See Extensions overview.
Vertical. A domain-specific set of panels grouped under the Verticals menu, such as Finance. Choosing a vertical swaps in its toolbar and panel group.
Composer. The AI chat panel, and the main agent surface in Mantis. It reads your selection, bags and clusters, and can drive the workspace. See Composer.
Mode. How the Composer behaves for a turn. There are three: orchestrator (full tool access), ask (read-only tools, no mutations), and visual tour (same tools, answer shaped as a guided tour of the map).
Runtime. The engine that executes a Composer turn. The default is the built-in Mantis assistant; coding-agent runtimes such as OpenCode and Claude Code run server-side and stream back into the same chat. See Agent runtimes.
MCP tool. One callable operation Mantis exposes over the Model Context Protocol, for example get_space_context, inspect or search. The Composer, the MCP panel and the Mantis CLI all call the same tools. See Mantis CLI.
SDK. Two different things share the name. window.mantis is the browser SDK an extension calls (SDK reference). Mantis_SDK is a separate Python client that drives the backend over REST.