Discover Canvas

Updated November 2, 2026 — Le Chat becomes Vibe. Since May 28, 2026, Le Chat is now Vibe (still at chat.mistral.ai): a single agent for work and code, with your conversations, settings, and subscriptions carried over. The legacy Le Chat experience remains accessible in Chat mode; in Work mode, agents are now skills (invoked with @), memories are the knowledge base, and deep search is the Deep Research skill. Plans are now Mistral Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise. This lesson now uses the name Vibe; some menus described here may have changed names or locations.

An editor built into Vibe

Canvas is the document editor built directly into Mistral AI’s Vibe. Instead of watching responses scroll by in the conversation thread, you get a dedicated workspace where long-form content gets created, edited, and refined in collaboration with the AI.

The benefit shows up in the step you skip: copying and pasting into an external document. As long as you stay in the thread, every new version of your text is a new message, and you have to track which one counts. With Canvas, there is only one document, and it stays in front of you.

Conversation on the left, document on the right

The screen splits into two zones you need to distinguish. On the left, the conversation panel remains your communication channel with the AI: you give instructions, request changes, and ask questions about the content being edited. On the right, the editing panel is your working document: you write directly there, modify generated text, restructure sections, and see changes appear in real time.

The mental model is simple: on the left you talk about the document, on the right you touch it. Beginners type their final text in the left panel and wonder why it doesn’t integrate into the document.

Open Canvas

The most reliable method is to ask explicitly, slipping the word “Canvas” into your request: “Open Canvas and draft a meeting report,” “In Canvas, create an outline for my presentation,” “Use Canvas to write this article.” The intent is unambiguous, and Vibe switches immediately.

Vibe may also propose Canvas on its own when your request clearly involves long-form content production: an article, a report, a detailed email, a project plan. This automatic detection is convenient, but don’t count on it when you already know where you’re going.

Edit, select, generate

Direct editing is the most obvious: click anywhere in the document to type, delete, or rephrase. Canvas is a full-fledged editor; you keep total control of the text.

The most useful maneuver, however, is selection followed by an instruction. Highlight the relevant passage, then formulate your request in the conversation panel: “Rephrase this paragraph in simpler language,” “Add concrete examples in this section,” “Make this introduction more impactful.” The AI then works on that scope and only that scope—the rest of the document, including sentences you carefully adjusted, remains intact. This surgical precision is what makes Canvas valuable.

You can also request generation of new content at the desired location: “Add a section on risks,” “Write a conclusion that recaps the three key points,” “Insert a transition paragraph between these two sections.” On the formatting side, Canvas handles hierarchical levels of headings and subheadings, bulleted and numbered lists, bold and italics, as well as code blocks for technical documents.

Why this beats the conversation thread

Three differences justify changing your habit. The first is persistence: in a classic conversation, requesting a modification triggers a complete rewrite of the text, with the risk that the AI reformats what you didn’t want to touch along the way. In Canvas, the document survives modifications and only the targeted parts move.

The second is the big-picture view. You see your entire text at all times, navigate between sections, and verify overall coherence, which a thread of successive messages makes practically impossible after the third version. The third is iteration speed: changing a word, rephrasing a sentence, moving a paragraph happens in a few clicks without losing work context.

Editor limitations

Canvas produces rich text, which you then retrieve in the tool of your choice—Google Docs, Word, Notion. It does not do layout: for complex composition mixing images and graphics, export the text content from Canvas and finalize in dedicated software. Finally, beyond fifty pages or so, better to split the work and process the document section by section rather than loading everything at once.

Getting started

Ask Vibe: “Open Canvas and create a professional email to propose a partnership to a tech company.” Read the draft that appears on the right, then click directly inside it to manually replace the company name and partnership details—you will thus experience manual editing. Next, select the last paragraph and ask in the chat: “Make this conclusion more engaging with a clear call to action.” Observe precisely what moves: only the selected paragraph changed, your manual corrections are still there.

Key takeaways

• Canvas is a document editor integrated into Vibe, designed for long-form content production
• The interface splits in two: conversation on the left, document on the right
• You can edit the document directly or request targeted modifications via chat
• Select text before requesting a modification for more precision
• Canvas is ideal for articles, reports, emails, and project plans