Obsidian Canvas core plugin (new in v1.1.0)

Canvas can make a very interesting commonplace book for visual topics

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Help;-; I can't add any note or card in canvas. My laptop is old and Obsidian can't run, so I have to use my phone.

I'm brand new to Obsidian. Your description and explanation of Canvas is wonderful. I played with it as you went through the video. It's really nice and it has given me a lot of ideas on how I can organize various projects that I'm involved with and arrange useful resources to help those projects move forward. Thank you!

Can you label the connecting arrows (à la C-map tools, and concept mapping in general)?

It would be cool if a canvas could be exported to a new vault.. what do you think?

A little disapointed that the relationship in a canvas cannot be shown in a regular relationship graph.

Thanks!

Which theme do you use? Thanks 💚

I do love Obsidian's stacked tabs. I just started using them and they work well for me. I am still working out if Canvas is for me. Interesting video, keep it up. 😊

a cool little feature i just stumbled on is holding ⌘ + hovering the cursor over a canvas in the file explorer pane ~ it displays a little preview of the shape/colors of the canvas 🟦🟩🟥

Very useful...great job! Thanks

Can canvas be publish with Obsidian Publish?

Somehow reminded me of LiquidText and Mindly.

Waiting for this feature especially on mobile

when I click edit on 'note' the font size is huge. any idea why it's doing that and if so how to adjust the font size thanks

I rslly appreciate your content about Obsidian and your conside way of explaining it. Just to be sure, you can only make new notes in the vault? You can't make them in Canvas and they appear in the vault right?

Thanks for this nice presentation of canvas

Argh!
I got all excited about the possibilities of Canvas, then I made a quick canvas page and tried to use it with Obsidian Publish and it was a hard nogo. Obsidian Publish disallows pages created with Canvas.

This is such a cool feature, I just stumbled across it by accident when I clicked on the New Canvas button on the left sidebar. I just made one to test it out, mapping out my Delta Green campaign's session notes and brainstorming stuff. I'm a very visual person, so it's super cool to be able to create a map like this and start making a Workspace out of it.

Regarding the notion that the canvas file is likely a proprietary format, I have a few thoughts: Looking at the information that's in that file, you're absolutely right, it's just JSON, which means that it's ultimately portable data. It's something that could be used anywhere, such as in a database, or mined and managed via Python scripts for instance. I agree that it does seem to be proprietary in that it's not something which will just "work" out of the box in other applications, but it's incredibly transparent, which is something I love to see.

The one I just made only has markdown files and text cards, and the way that shows up in the canvas file is as two arrays in the JSON map: "nodes" and "edges". All items in both arrays include a unique identifier which is probably generated when the object is added to the canvas, as well as other metadata including its positional coordinates, its size, and what the node is. I only have two: "file" and "text". The links to the resources themselves are very transparent as well, as they're just relative paths from the root of your Obsidian vault, just like everything else when you're linking notes in Obsidian.

Edges are interesting, and deceptively simple: They track a "From" and a "To" both of which simply reference the unique ID of the nodes in question, and they keep track of which sides the arrows are coming from and to, so it basically looks like this:
EdgeID, fromNode: someNodeID, fromSide: top, toNode: someOtherNodeId, fromSide: left.
This format strikes me as very intuitive, and easily manipulable if someone were so inclined. If I really wanted to, I get super granular with the placement of notes, or even create notes onto the canvas exactly where I want them to be, and link them to any other notes, completely out of whole cloth without even touching the canvas.

This is the kind of design philosophy that I greatly appreciate about Obsidian, and it's one of the core reasons I prefer this app over other note taking solutions: Your stuff is just your stuff. It also means that if someone else comes along and makes a totally different application, it could very easily accept canvas files as they are and display them in its own way. Granted, we get into the murky territory of derivative development with non-open-source products. It's hard for me to really see these canvas files as proprietary (so to speak) because are ultimately very straightforward and transparent information, organized in a sensible, human-readable fashion. But I'm also only seeing one side of the picture, and I haven't seen under the hood.

Canvas + excalidraw ❤️

This is exciting! Thanks for making a great video about it Nicole. You are my GO TO source for Obsidian

WOW! Thank you

Canvas is awesome! QUESTION: How does one filter out Canvases files from other notes? - I just want to see the Canvases I have created - they seem to get mixed and lost into all my other notes. I have STARed a canvas or two, I have made a link to my Canvases from other Evergreen Notes, but it seems like my Canvases could get lost in all the other notes. Also, I tried putting a TAG into the Canvas and then search on the TAG - the Canvas filename does not appear in my TAG searches.

Thank you for the great introduction. 🙏

This is such a grreat addition. Thanks for the intro.

A few months ago I discovered Obsidian and only played around with it a bit listlessly. First your videos gave me an idea of how powerful Obsidian is. Canvas is a real gamechanger because I can now replace OneNote and the knowledge collected is finally stored in the open Markdown standard. I can also replace the Mindmapper and todo list and finally evaluate my huge mail archive efficiently. Obsidian is really a second brain and above all a real productivity booster! Nicole, thanks and please keep up your excellent work! 👍👍👍

What would you say is the benefits of using this over Kanban, or the benefits of using Kanban over this?

Looks similar to Freeform on iphone.

Does anyone know how to add tags to the actual Canvas? I love this feature, but I'm not sure how to organize them.

Canvas is super cool....I wish I could have that feature in Smart Phone,too.....

Wow! This is really cool. I hadn't really seen the purpose until your video. Thanks!

Great video as always! I wish Obsidian made the linking of the notes in canvas also optionally based on the in-the-note linkage...maybe next release. Also would love to see even basic whiteboarding features, so I can cut some tools from my toolbox for basic whiteboarding/diagraming

How can I become an “insider” or a beta tester? Thank you for your content on obsidian!

This is perhaps one of the greatest features Obsidian has put out since its inception.

An infinite canvas akin to a Miro Board to manually place and connect your notes is a game changer.

That's precisely what I've been looking for for a long time, and will definitely help me avoid getting sidetracked and losing small individual notes. (They tend to get lost even if they get linked with other notes if you merely have your last few notes in tabs.)

Hey... when I go to the obsidian website, then it says that only version 1.0 is available for mac. Can anyone suggest where to get the 1.1.0?

Game changer feature, game changer!

This is amazing 🤩. It's basically the only thing I miss from Onenote 💛. Thanks so much for the video. 😁👍

Okay, now I want to move back to Obsidian again! 😂

Seriously excited - sounds like one more thing from what I wanted to see is getting to Obsidian. Few more to go, but I'm already hooked up.

Interesting. Nearly there for concept mapping :)

Maybe I missed it the vid - BUT if I start off with say 10 notes of the same vault (maybe the same folder and or tagged as belonging to the same subject area) these might already have relationships... aren't these "drawn" for me so I cab add from other folders/tags (or possibly other vaults)?

As someone with a low attention span who likes to juggle around different notes all the time. This feature will be massively useful.

I have canvas doc how i activated

Merci Nicole pour cette vidéo, j'ai également fait une vidéo sur ma chaîne pour parler de cette merveilleuse fonctionnalité 😀. À bientôt.

Nicole, is it possible to use dataview and canvas together? Suppose I’d create a list or a table query for showing all notes with a specific tag. Additionally to the list or table, I’d like to get all those notes in canvas. It would be perfect to visually organize notes (my idea is to get all literature notes for articles I’m going to write and display those notes on a canvas)… Oh, Lord, the possibilities are huge. Instead of getting groups of tabs on Mac or Ipad, I can get a canvas with several web pages (ok, I know I can do that just by getting a list of links, but the canvas is more powerful and intuitive).

Omg im actually so lit about this

I'm a little sad there is no draw feature. But still a great feature.