Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

obsidian.md

1,380 pointsericax387 comments

Obsidian Canvas uses a new JSON-based file format that we have open-sourced under MIT license. You can see the spec here:

https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/canva...

Just like all other files in Obsidian, canvas files are your own and local to your device. You're still linking to your own Markdown files which are just as future-proof as ever.

We decided to create the .canvas format because there wasn't any pre-existing canvas-type format we could find that fit our priorities around longevity, readability, interoperability and extensibility.

The .canvas format is designed to be as easy to parse as possible. We've already seen a few plugins take advantage of it, and we hope that more tools will become available that can use the .canvas format.

Why every electron app feels the need to reinvent the window border/title?

Does this look OK? https://i.postimg.cc/4ymyHWxF/window-border.png

The local first approach is the primary reason I use Obsidian. I trust that I can _depend_ on Obsidian because of this.

On the other hand, this has also caused some headaches around using it on mobile.. but so far this has been a worthwhile tradeoff. Thanks for all the hard work!

I use iCloud Drive as a vault location. The trick is to create it first on the Mobile app and then use the desktop app later to point to that vault.

If you are transferring from desktop to mobile, make sure the .obsidian folder inside the vault is copied also

Syncthing comes to my mind for that specific need. https://syncthing.net/

Syncing bytes is easy, many solutions exist (and syncthing / syncthing-fork is good at it).

Syncing by merging changes and resolving possible conflicts is a much harder task. Theoretically git has all the right bits, including the pluggable diffing and merging. In practice, I haven't seen it seriously used in this capacity.

This is to say nothing about files you only want on one node but not on another (heavy stuff lives on server and laptop, but not mobile, etc.)

This is why special-case syncing tools that know how to sync semantically are indispensable.

Syncthing on mobile is a little clunky because of OS limitations on background processes. Basically the reason I pay for Obsidian's own sync addon

I use syncthing together with wireguard to keep my vaults synced across devices.

Syncthing works well on Android for photos, music, movies, and downloads. Not so much for notes. You'll end up with conflicts, and there aren't many great ways to merge changes on mobile.

Obsidian Sync is by no means cheap, but I've never used a better syncing service. I'm on my second year and can't think of a single issue I've had across laptops, desktops, an Android phone, and a Chromebook.

I can think of a number of other notes syncing that's better -- probably even Evernote's. As a happily paying Obsidian Sync customer, I'll drop some reality, so new people aren't caught off-guard.

- Obsidian Sync is pretty slow.

- Obsidian Sync doesn't happen in the background, at present. That means, if you just made a bunch of updates in Obsidian, or you haven't opened the Obsidian mobile app in a while, you're in for a wait.

- Obsidian Sync occasionally has sync errors that involve manual interaction.

That said, it's fine and the overall Obsidian experience makes it worth it (well, if you can swing a discounted price).

I love Obsidian Sync as well but to be devil's advocate, it doesn't "just work" as a lot of people claim. It's still a bit rough around the edges. For example, it doesn't sync settings or starred files immediately. I've also noticed it dropping some text if I edit the same file on multiple devices simultaneously (or even in quick succession before sync is able to catch up). I'm sure these issues and more would exist with a 3rd party syncing solution but Obsidian sync still needs some work before it's perfect.

It depends on your workflow. I use git to sync my obsidian vault. There's plugins to automate this, but doing it manually isn't that bad either. I use mobile mostly to read notes, and occasionally I'll write down a short line or two which I can sync over and edit and organize on desktop.

Some options for syncing on mobile:

Obsidian sells a first party syncing solution, which I hear works well:

https://obsidian.md/sync

I do git syncing on Android via termux (It works most of the time, except when git decides to shit itself every now and then on my tablet):

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/guide-using-git-to-sync-your-obs...

I can't vouch for it because I don't have any iOS devices new enough to support it, but supposedly you can use Working Copy to sync via git on iOS:

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mobile-setting-up-ios-git-based-...

I went for the paid syncing because I want it to "just work" while still having the futureproof way of storing the data locally in an accessible way.

So far it has worked absolutely flawless. If I change a file it's changing on my connected device in seconds. Not exactly like working on a shared google doc but close enough that I would even use it as a hack to quickly share links between my mobile and my desktop

I’m using Working Copy on iOS with the setup described in the post. It’s working like a charm for me

I just use DropSync and put all my Vaults in one synced Dropbox folder (to get around DropSync's folder limit). Works like a charm.

I use it with Working Copy git client, nice and properly nerdy setup. There are nice ready-made guides for this combo.

So simple, they combine the best of all eras: local first, open, published formats and pluggable/byo multi-device sync/backup – Cloud if you wish, but not required. It gives me hope for the future, I wish more software these days followed this model.

Caveat: not an obsidian user (although I am a big step closer after this)

This is great. Just testing it out with a goal to switch from OneNote to canvas.

It can borrow a few things from OneNote e.g.

- cards resize automatically with text.

- OneNote starts with a cursor, clicking anywhere on canvas and writing is a single click operation.

- There are no hard borders around cards in OneNote.

- OneNote is WYSIWYG which this canvas isn't currently.

This is not a definitive list and I know its too early to ask for new features and stuff. Good things to consider IMO.

Just as a data point. This feature of one-note (text boxes where you click) is the single reason I’m looking for something else. I absolutely hate any interface that has me fiddle with layout when I’m trying to focus on semantics.

Not that this should impact Obsidian much, since I assume the canvas thing is optional there, just a data point.

Related to infinite canvas _do_ checkout “The Humane Environment” [1] it has a few interesting takes

As for a more semantic approach to layouting, I think Flying Logic[2] makes a decent job of it

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/344726.The_Humane_Int...

[2] https://flyinglogic.com/

I use OneNote extensively and as I understand each page is like a white board where you can write anything anywhere. If I wanted a linear interface I would be using Word instead.

I like the hard borders.

Markdown was never intended for data with a graph structure, so I think it's the right decision to use a different simple format instead of creating yet another bloated non-standard Markdown variant.

Yes! Compliment the standard, don't obfuscate it even more. As someone who mostly write org rather than md, but sometime have to write md in various places, it's confusing that they're not all the same.

Agreed here too. This was a poor choice IMO. They call it canvas but it looks like a poor hybrid between mind mapping and UML. Markdown already supports hierarchy. I am guessing this let's you set coordinates for how to lay the canvas out but this is exactly why I'd never use it.

What does it mean to open-source or MIT-license a "file format"?

The MIT license is a license about copyrighted software, allowing people to use/modify/publish that software. But a file format isn't a piece of software.

Are you open-sourcing the specification document for the file format? (people are still free to write software that reads+writes the file format even if the specification document isn't open-sourced).

Are you open-sourcing your particular library for reading the file format? (I'm confused here, because you stressed that the file format was so simple, so I'd have expected it easy and maybe even desirable for many people to come up with libraries for reading+writing the file foramt?)

It's just a marketing gimmick.

Anyone is free to write software that modifies a file - there is no copyright law protecting that. This is one of the reasons why many large corporations are pushing hard towards cloud - they can protect the format AND the platform then monetize it at will. End users lose control.

I will give them points for putting it in a readable file format. But placing it under an MIT license and "open sourcing" it, doesn't do anything - and they know that. It's just fluff to market their new features.

Edit: Re-reading what I posted, In case it's taken the wrong way, I am not disparaging the team at Obsidian in any way:

I think they do good work and make great software.

IANAL

> The file itself is considered instead to be an idea or a system and is therefore not protected by the laws of copyright. So the description of a file format is copyrightable, but the format as it exists in its medium is not.

https://www.fileformat.info/mirror/egff/ch08_09.htm

I wish I could edit my post to simply say open format for now. The MIT license currently refers to the spec and the documentation. Over time it will also include any tooling we open source (e.g. validator, linter, migration tools). The intention here is to work towards a shared format for this type of relational+spatial data, and we're hoping to collaborate with other members of the ecosystem to make something that can have interoperability and longevity.

Great! I love the philosophy around open and clear formats. Like I have said before, a second brain should be as open and reliable as possible.

Trello boards export to JSON, would you consider it open? OneNote notebooks are also an open and well-documented specification, as well as local first and backed by a very reliable company, which makes them just as open as Obsidian by those standards.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_form...

The Canvas JSON is not an export format, it is the file that the app actually reads and edits. Being explicitly MIT licensed also gives permission to other people/companies to build their own tools using that format.

Exporting is different than "being stored in". Since it does not represent the full state of the data, no.

OneNote and this canvas format might be equally open and interoperable, but it's a hard claim to justify that onenote notebooks are as open as a folder of mostly standard markdown (the two exceptions being wikilinks and embeds)

Long time user. It’s so fast and fantastic to have full control.

We're using whatboard.app for this at present. A bit different in approach, but a more more manageable and less infinite canvas. That said, this looks really cool and may be worth the desktop-app install.

I can't use this for work unless I pay $50 per year, is that right?

If I sign up for the Sync or Publish plans, do I still need to pay $50 per year to use it at work? Or is that included?

I don't think you would need either sync or publish at work. I haven't used canvas yet, as it's a new feature, but obsidian is a key app at work for me. Up to this point at least, it's been free :)

Make a private repo, and git commit / push / pull your obsidian notes and canvases just like you would any other shared repo

If you want to use it for work, you need a commercial license. That's $50/month, yes.

https://obsidian.md/eula

I was just researching graph representations. I would have used dictionaries for edges and nodes indexed by their IDs.. because that representation is json-merge patchable, which is useful for specifying atomic bulk graph operations.

Yes, I much prefer local and do my own backups (rclone to backblaze) on just about everything. I only drop stuff on iCloud when I need to share it and a couple of ongoing spreadsheets I use to track stuff.

small thing but downloading and installing the obsidian snap package requires the `--dangerous --classic` arguments with snap (since it's not coming from a repository); may want to add that to the instructions

~Can't wait to try this out~ just installed, thank you!

Thank you.

This isn't what "open sourced" means.

Photoshop is proprietary software with a well documented file format anyone can read and write.

So is this software. "Open source" is not branding, it means something.

It's okay to make and promote and sell proprietary commercial software. That's what you are doing, be proud and clear about it. Pretending your efforts have anything to do with free software is deceptive.

You are confusing two different ideas here. The Canvas format is MIT licensed in the same way that Markdown uses a BSD-type license. That means we are giving explicit permission for anyone to use the format and build apps, scripts, plugins on top of it.

Photoshop/PSD on the other hand is a closed proprietary format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_file_format

You’re focusing on a single word in a sentence which was just about the format.

Yeah and its developed by Adobe which creates a walled garden around there products making file format interoperability very difficult.

Obsidian on the other hand uses open formats with open standards. The difference is NIGHT and DAY.

And if the goal is taking freedom away from the people who are using your product, or to artificially keep people using your product because you know you are making the world a worst place to live in, making that type of propriety software is not OK, even though there are plenty of misguided organizations and people who do it.

As evidenced by a link to AlternativeTo on their own site, this space has a lot (145+) of competition [0]. At some level, I worry about using things much more complex than a text file, because of portability and longevity. It's enough of a pain transitioning between Google and Microsoft (and back) every few years based on various jobs.

I have files from the late 1980's that I can still read, but only with Libre Office because Apple's supplied apps can't read old MacWrite files.

Some people swear by OneNote or Notion or Keep or various mind mapping software, but keeping things cross platform and simple is a challenge. I was never an Evernote person, but it sounds like that turned into a bit of a debacle. These tools work for now, but will they work 5 or 10 years from now?

[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/obsidian/

That's kinda the biggest selling point of Obsidian...? It's all just markdown files. Markdown is a standard format, so you can open it in many other apps as well.

Markdown is fine for formatting text, not convinced it's great for knowledge management.

I disagree; I think a system like Wikipedia shows that a textual and visual format like markdown provides the flexibility to convey pretty much any information. For any formal and semantic storage system, you will probably spend more time adapting it to each specific use case than to actually fill it with content.

Formatting and knowledge management are somewhat orthogonal concepts, aren't they? You store information in a textfile, have rendering thereof based on Markdown, and another layer to reference and index files.

The thing is that if you want something portable where if the app goes down you can still use it, you don't have many options. There aren't really any formats that support the kind of note linking used in PKM by default, besides maybe HTML but if you think that's a better solution than markdown I think we have a difference in values that can't really be remedied here. So assuming you're not using HTML, now you're looking for a common format that is easily parsed so that you can have links, and also simple enough that you can look at it on pretty much any PC. That really only leaves markdown and plaintext (and maybe JSON? But again, same as HTML, that technically works but it doesn't really fit the bill here), and markdown is just better for notetaking

I agree. Markdown is way too much overrated as a multi purpose document format. I find it very limiting even w/ Obsidian. It would probably work well for some text-people, but anything more complicated than 1D character stream won't fit well into Markdown.

Org-mode works well. It is essentially just a markup like Markdown.

On the other hand, the fact that there are so many Markdown-based editors that can read the files you create in Obsidian gives plain text format more resilience over time. Even if Obsidian were to disappear, your writing and ideas will still be accessible in the future.

Also I would argue that you can rather simply write a parser for the basic markdown syntax and convert it to e.g. HTML or plain text if necessary by getting rid of markdown specific syntax.

Or use pandoc[0] to convert a markdown file to an HTML file (and many other file types)

[0]: https://pandoc.org/

Markdown is plain text, with conventions. To lose the ability ti see your data would requiring us to lose utf8 encoding which is unlikely as it is self perpetuating.

Maybe many people on HN can do this. A lot fewer people than that on HN want to do it. And many people who use Markdown outside of HN can't do it.

If I may interject, AlternativeTo is a pretty shallow platform for finding alternatives (I do wonder if you even checked their listings), and it's also biased - run by a moderator team that can deny/approve listings as they please.

> AlternativeTo is a pretty shallow platform

I've found AlternativeTo to be the complete opposite of shallow. In most cases its pretty precise in exhaustively listing every viable software alternative, which abundant filter options. Even if the ordering is "biased" (which I haven't really encountered), the site is quite useful without having many alternatives itself.

Well, what's the alternative to AlternativeTo then?

https://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto/

I'm also worried by this, which is precisely why I'm considering a move to Obsidian from Notion. I'm pretty much writing everything in Markdown by now, including my personal blog.

How is moving from Obsidian to Notion relevant? They're basically the same thing?

I keep losing my files with cloud-first systems. I had a trove of notes in Evernote and I don't even remember which email I used to open it, nor if they are there anymore. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't lose local-first markdown files, as I could do the same thing I do with code: keep them in git, and then have a cloud backup for good measure.

The difference is with a local-first editor (like Obsidian) you hopefully get to keep your files if the company stops being nice

From FOSS alternatives listed there, LogSeq [1] looks quite promissing! It also mentiones canvas feature in their docs [2] (which are written as LogSeq graph, too). I am still evaluating it but so far so good, it even has an Android app (as a pre-release on GitHub).

[1] https://logseq.com [2] https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/whiteboard

Not everything needs to live for decades. Sometimes the ephemeral capture is just as important in sorting out your ideas.

What doesn't work for me with these tools is that once I've gone deep I still need a tool that offers the absolute MINIMUM friction in its interface and for me nothing has conquered an A3 sheet and a box of coloured pencils.

Perhaps I should invest my time in really learning one of these tools but they never seem to be seamless enough to pose a real challenge to a pen and paper. Maybe if I had a Wacom tablet...?

A drawing tablet helped me some, when I paired it with Xournal++. I think there are apps for iOS and Android tablets with nicer and faster interfaces, but I don't use tablets, so they didn't help. But the ability to quickly select a group of pen strokes and just move them around to make new room, as well as the ability to quickly paste screenshots of anything I was doing anywhere else on my computer made a big difference.

i bought a remarkable tablet for that purpose but still failed to adopt it.

Yeah, the Remarkable looks like the most likely candidate to be able to displace a sheet of paper but my hangup is that the lack of colour will hinder its usability too much for me. I always use a few coloured pens when I scribble my notes.

One thing that's really missing for me from Obsidian is a view similar to that of Google Keep. Like sometimes I want to drop a small note "my stuff is in locker 2130" or "Look into Open Library <> WikiData linking percentage" and then easily be able to see it again in a few of all notes most recent.

A thread on Reddit give me a small hope this update may do that but I don't think so.

PS: I'm aware of the daily notes viewer, and that's what I currently use for most of these situations. But it doesn't help with having a simple way to see contents of all recently created notes.

Edit: this is something I mostly want for mobile

I'm using both Obsidian and Apple Notes, both on my iPhone and MacBook, and that's also the main thing I'm missing in Obsidian and keeps me partly on Apple Notes: it's faster and easier to create a note in Apple Notes, retrieve it (as they as are sorted from most recent by default, and also I can pin some notes), search, and navigate in folders (especially on mobile, navigating across folders is so much better with Apple Notes than Obsidian). I'd really like to see Obsidian takes some inspiration from Apple Notes there and improve his. Otherwise, it is fantastic tool and it's really good to know that everything is stored locally in plain text.

Preface: I am a massive Obsidian fan and use it everyday.

The problem is they wanted it multi platform on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux so they made it using electron. Unless they either do native versions for each platform (5 apps!) or rewrite the entire application in something quicker like Tauri it’s never going to be as fast as apple notes, and will only get worse every time you add a new plugin.

My interpretation of their word “faster” was in terms of UI design, not physical app speed.

Please, we don’t need to have the electron rant every single time an app that uses it is discussed.

Huh. It's almost like writing native guis with cross-platform bindings was a thing for a reason.

They could consider rewriting it in Flutter/Dart. My understanding is that Flutter is faster than Electron.

There are community-extensions for this. "Vault Changelog"recently edited files, and "Recent Files" recently opened files. Not sure how well they work on mobile.

But true, a google keep like tile-view with auto-layout and filters would be a useful enhancement for obsidian.

Could probably do it with obsidian dataview + embeds which would work on android at least. Not sure how they deal with community plugins + app store policy though on iOS.

If you look at the Quick Switch view on desktop or mobile it will show you most recent.

Also, if you use a 3rd party storage solution instead of Obsidian Sync, you can view recently modified/created notes in the Recents on there.

If you wanted to see the content of all recent notes, you can write a custom query for the dataview extension that attempts it.

I had the exact same problem. I ended up writing a small ios app. It only contains one textarea and sync text between devices.

It was rejected by appstore for simplicity. But works well for me.

Seems interesting ! What did you use to sync the text between devices please ?

Would adding a setting for the backend server sufficiently increase the complexity to get it published?

Agreed - I have the very same issue as well. Google Keep is my goto mobile app for most of my note capture just due to its speed and ease of use. Now I have a few github utilities to download my Keep notes to markdown for Obsidian use later - but that isn't really ideal yet.

PS - all I can say about Canvas is 'wow'!!! Awesome feature!

Drop these quick notes into a folder (can be automated with Templater). Create another note that uses the DataView plugin to show you a table of all the files in this folder sorted by the creation date.

I use Nextcloud Notes for that. It has decent mobile app and works great with few notes (Nextcloud Notes doesn't work as second brain very much).

I have two notes in there - Buffer and Shopping list. Buffer is one note for all the small stuff you mentioned. I also have widget on phone homescreen for that note so I can access it pretty seamlessly. Of course, it also means, you need to access some Nextcloud instance (I run my own).

Edit: I use Obsidian synced with Nextcloud for all the "second brain" things.

I use Craft for this. Short term notes or stuff like receipt scans. Then (where relevant) I copy paste into Obsidian for longer term linking or whatever

I search for 'path:/' and sort by 'Modified time (new to old)' which isn't quite what you want, but improved things for me.

I just shifted from Logseq to Obsidian over the last couple of weeks. One of my reasons for doing so is that while Logseq does technically store your notes as local markdown files, there's so much added on top of that, that I can't really open my notes folder in Typora/[markdown editor of choice] and have a smooth experience reading my notes. The underlying format might be open, but there was still lock-in. Obsidian seems much better for that - there'll always be a tradeoff between features and portability, but I do prefer Obsidian's balance.

I wrote a very rough Python script to help me move my graph over to Obsidian - if anyone else is in the same boat, feel free to try it out https://github.com/NishantTharani/LogSeqToObsidian

I feel like common markdown notes is a myth.

Once you start getting into your notes you quickly run into common markdowns limitations and it's super simple stuff like centering images or adding captions. Then you choose to either flavor your markdown or use HTML and it's no longer common markdown.

Thanks a lot for sharing the script!

I too am considering switching to Obsidian at least to see the difference wrt LogSeq as per my current note-taking approach.

I like Obsidian's community and development better but used LogSeq because of the outliner experience.

I've been concerned about Obsidian sync. IIRC, data goes to AWS servers but where does it go from there?

From reading the Obsidian website, they seem a tiny company. However, it is unclear where they are based and, therefore, what legal obligations they are operating under. What more, Obsidian has so far avoided the levels of compliance that allows for adoption by big businesses.

I love me some Obsidian but I'm mindful that, using their services, I just don't know how my data is being treated.

I realize vaults are encrypted locally. However, do we know that our vault secret isn't shared with Obsidian? Sure, it's (mostly?) an Electron app. But just how transparent and accountable is Obsidian about their operations?

No, we do not use AWS. The Sync and Publish servers are running in Digital Ocean datacenters in the US. How sync encrypts the data is documented here: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Security+and+privacy

As others have already pointed out, Sync is not the only option to synchronize notes, Obsidian sync is just a convenience option.

For compliance, I am guessing you mean certs like SOC 2 / ISO 27001?, or what are you referencing? As we are a tiny company (6 people, not all full time) we just can't expense the time needed to get such a certificate.

From the link:

> AES-256 is a military-grade encryption specification that's widely used in for example online banking.

The term “military grade” is meaningless and if anything raises a red flag (at least to me). What would be more useful is a detailed spec on the implementation.

Are the crypto routines implemented in house or has a well tested library been used? If in house, had there been an external code audit done? What were the results ?

SOC2, yes.

Obsidian is based in Canada. Obsidian Sync is E2E encrypted so the company has no way of accessing your files. The privacy policy is here https://obsidian.md/privacy

You also do not need to trust Obsidian with any of your data. The files are local to your device so you can sync them however you want. If you don't want to use Obsidian Sync you can use Git, Dropbox, Syncthing, etc.

I can't answer any of your other questions but Obsidian is owned by Dynalist, which is based in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Their OCN number is 2538019 if you want to search them up, they're also on CrunchBase https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dynalist

You don't have to use obsidian sync. Workspaces are just markdown files in your prefered folder structure, with some obsidian metadata (plugins, recently opened, etc). You can back them up in the same way as any files/folders.

https://syncthing.net/ is your friend, too.

I just have Obsidian save locally, and I use Sync to sync those files between machines.

Coupled with a dynamic plugins ecosystem, this is going to be a game changer (even in an already somewhat crowded market [1])

For example, (future) plugins for advanced filtering and automatic layouts [2] will certainly help manipulate very large canvases.

[1] Most of it is online/collaborative (https://infinitecanvas.tools/gallery/) though so it is not exactly the same.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrbLZvHDPqI

This looks like Obsidian's first move away from using some dialect of markdown? The .canvas files appear to be human readable json, but certainly not as readable as markdown. I'm excited to try this out, but I hope this isn't a trend towards using proprietary formats.

We considered many options to use Markdown but came to the conclusion that Canvas is not something that can fit into a readable Markdown file. Either the Markdown file would so messy that it becomes pointless (i.e. you would never open it in Typora to edit), or it would severely limit the power of Canvas.

After much internal debate we chose the JSON format. We stay committed to keep it as open and easy to work with as possible. Plugin developers are already parsing and modifying the JSON file to programmatically change a Canvas view, and I think that's a fantastic start!

IMO it is the best compromise.

Now that you crossed that line, I hope the next "custom format" will be a "real" outliner. You are surely familiar with outliners ;-) It is about full block-level support really, and all what that allows (API, backlinks, query, aliases...)

Anyway, Canvas Rocks! Thanks!

Opportunity cost. I wrote on your forums about the decioson of using plain markdown. Consider other formats to stop bloating(yaml and dataview variables) markdown files. Now you have bloated md files and another format. Now i am saying you will add sqlite after one or two years. Waiting for extra file formats making existing files ugly. Also obsidian needs multi user vaults. Start to think what extra file format needed for this.

The .canvas files are a JSON-based file format that we open-sourced under MIT license. Just like everything else in Obsidian, it's still all local files on your device.

You can see the spec for .canvas here: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/canva...

The linked documents are still Markdown.

If I understand it correctly, the use case is to link existing MD notes visually. That's a different way of looking at the data than the two-way backlink approach that was the foundation of Obsidian (and other personal wiki tools).

I'm interested in this, as I currently use a combination of Obsidian + SimpleMind, but currently SimpleMind has more features (full fledged mindmapping app), and I like having two separate spaces to sketch out ideas.

I also use both, Simplemind is a fantastic mind mapping app.

For smaller scale mindmapping though, I am finding Canvas very usable already for such an early release. The ability to easily link or embed to markdown files (or create new ones) is really nice, and I like having all my work in a common area. Community created plugins will also dramatically expand the app.

There will always be advantages for the dedicated apps as well, but this is going to be a great option for many.

And there's nothing saying you have to use it, this doesn't remove the regular notes.

Or even harder-to-parse open formats. Doesn't have to be proprietary to be a pain.

I am amazed how Obsidian adds new features that are exactly what I was looking for. I already liked using it with the Kanban plugin, and I think adding such support for graph/diagram-like notes is the last piece of the puzzle for many users.

While the feature itself was interesting, adding such a feature made alarm in my head. I don't think this is necessarily a good trend. Please Obsidian needs to be very, very cautious about adding such large features.

I won't forget why I, and many others, gave up Evernote. It did too much, not too little.

Obsidian is built on a modular architecture. Canvas view is a plugin so you can turn it off if you don't want to use it. Not much is changing with the core. You can still run Obsidian as a very lightweight app with most plugins disabled.

I've taken to calling Obsidian "The VS Code of Text" for this very reason. Thanks for all you do for building a fantastic tool that I use every day!

Thanks. That's what I like about Obsidian, a flexible tool kit, instead of KFC party bucket. I just wanted to (self-servingly) remind Obsidian to keep in mind not to go down that road.

Hmm, not sure what you talking about (and I also never use Evernote), because I always see Obsidian as a Toolbox that you could customize personally to your own taste.

But I do understand why you came up with that thinking, can't denied that a lot of us did fall into that pitfall of overcomplicating stuff.

> It did too much, not too little.

Not sure whether this is true. Evernote did much, but on the wrongs parts, in the wrong ways, and then abounded them often in poor state. So in fact they did not enough on the important parts. They barely added the things people demanded, instead added features barely anyone asked for, or rewrote the clients for third or fourth time.

Obsidian on the other side has a sleak core, and everything else is in extensions. Even the core-app itself comes with most parts in extensions. While also allowing the users themselves to add extensions for their demand. This is significant more healthy than whatever evernote did.

It wasn't the feature-bloat that made me give up on EN. It was the broken sync, the difficulty getting an export of my notes from their server, the brutally sluggish mobile and desktop apps, etc.

Obsidian doesn't seem to be going down that road. Using another provider to store the notes (Dropbox, S3, Blob, self-hosted disk space, etc.) takes care of issues #1 and #2. Making this an optional plugin answer #3.

Did it do too much, or was it too opinionated and bloated? Obsidian is neither!

Obsidian devs have shown repeatedly that they understand why Obsidian is successful - just look at how they released this. No canvas-specific core software changes, just a new plugin that can be disabled.

Like any core plugin, you can just disable it if you don't need it.

this feature is actually related to note taking though. its not like evernote where they were off making nonsense contacts or food rating apps instead of improving their core note taking app

I would kill for some sort of integration between Remarkable and Obsidian. Both are excellent tools and the Remarkable is great for sketching on the go. I just wish I could keep both in sync somehow.

I'm working on a sync tool specifically for ReMarkable to Obsidian.

https://scrybble.ink

It's still in beta for now, so it's definitely not flawless, but it does work! You can choose which files from your tree to sync, they will appear as pdf files in your vault.

Just purchased the "Early bird tier" to give it a try. I just get a "500 Server Error" when clicking the "View Content" link in gumroad.

When this gets to reasonable stability, this may be enough to get me to buy ReMarkable just for it. It might be worth seeing if they have any sort of referral program. "Buy ReMarkable through me & get X months syncing free!" type deal.

This is exactly what I've been looking for. Thank you! Very excited to use this.

The page isn't loading for me but I'll take a look later on as this could be super interesting!

That's one of the reasons i went with an Onyx Boox tablet instead of a Remarkable - that way i have the Android Obsidian app, in sync, and i can sketch on it (with Excalidraw, i haven't tested Canvas yet).

Onyx + obsidian is such a great combo

It appears to be convoluted but Remarkable -> Rextract -> Readwise -> Obsidian looks like a path.

[0]: https://github.com/zachwick/rextract

Supernote is the superior device compared to Remarkable

Feels nice and solid!

One thing I immediately wanted was key commands and fast clicking to create cards like FigJam https://www.figma.com/figjam/ This is an amazing tool for brainstorming and collaborating during meetings.

It looks like we can't assign key commands for the canvas actions yet. That will make it much faster to work with.

Imagine: - C then click to place a card. This would go into text edit mode inside the card right away. (currently it gets snaggled up with VIM mode requiring me to go into insert) - I then click to place an image, then the asset search dialog opens - N then click to place a Note, then note search dialog opens

When you are brainstorming you want to add cards really quick. Deleting, moving, cloning should all be really immediate. I'm sure this can be easily achieved.

Thank you so much for Obsidian!

This is fantastic development, something that really makes a difference in how you can use Obsidian. I got notified from LogSeq group that they are also introducing whiteboard, so clearly innovation is happening at really good pace.

There is more room for innovation, as these "thinking spaces" are still inflexible and I expect to see more good things. Obsidian has huge advantage that is open and you are never scared to lose your work in somebody's walled garden.

To me, this is more important then any VR or anything like this as it helps us use computers to think and collaborate, augment our abilities. What were original reason for making computers, not just enslaving our attention in dopamine loop.

Is there anyone else's brain doesn't work well with canvas like mine? It looks unorganized to me with "group" and "arrow". Unlike structural design like we are used to on daily basis like "order" (left-to-right + top-to-bottom), "index" (several kind of nav). When I look at this type of canvas my brain is confused where to start, what's the order because it looks like a mesh. I guess this is for popular brains?

I find it useful for some things and awkward for others.

I've been using Gingko [1] for a long while now. The ever-expanding-but-hierarchical structure it uses hits a sweet spot for me.

1: https://gingkoapp.com/

Yeah it's called "miller columns" which I tried (as a implementer) once. The width constraint per column is not quite nice, and when it has more than 3 columns, the horizontal scroll ux makes it worse (I think it's ok on mobile). I haven't found a good ux on tree structure in general, it's just suck.

This is cool, but the killer feature I'm looking for is a UI that matches the functionality of grit https://github.com/climech/grit. Grit itself isn't particularly functional for every-day use, but its write-up in the readme is excellent and the DAG hasn't been realized by any existing task tracking software (as far as I'm aware).

Obsidian Team, help me out here. What are some actual use cases for canvas? Specifically, how does this enhance the user's ability to record, synthesize, and recall their ideas? I am a huge Obsidian fan, I fully understand what canvas does and how it's used. But I don't get the point. I see the team devoting lots of energy to this feature, so I assume I'm missing something.

It's another level of organization and visualization of Obsidian content, and is extensible just like Obsidian's other core features.

But the spatial dimension really opens up other opportunities. For instance, I've been using the webviews to create workspaces for the various tasks I do - code review, writing/drafting documents.

Being able to drag and drop content from various places (including webviews) into the canvas feels magic.

With a few minor usability enhancements I'd probably be ready to call this my new favorite web browser!

But generally, it's an interface for expressing relationships between pieces of Obsidian content. Absent additional plugins, these relationships are user-defined, but they could easily be generated since they're pure JSON. Sky's the limit if you ask me. I'm excited to start writing a plugin that enhances the webviews a bit.

Check out the #showcase-canvas channel in the Obsidian Discord group https://obsidian.md/community

Use cases I have seen shared in the channel: family trees, storyboards, taxonomy, mind maps, workflow diagrams, roadmaps, research notes, project management, etc.

In my personal use of Canvas, I have been using it for planning house renovation project, developing a new baking recipe (with images of the various iterations).

It can also be used as a scratchpad alongside YouTube videos or web pages that you want to annotate.

I honestly cannot grasp how is it possible for the Obsidian team to consistently release such high quality software on a regular basis, almost for free and with such a small team.

Just incredible, and if anybody from Obsidian reads that, you have my utmost respect.

I kind of wish they would plant a stake in the ground and declare it feature complete and then go into maintenance mode. It's almost inevitable that they are going to keep adding features, give up control to VCs, and then fade away like Evernote.

This feature is neat, but it feels like a turning point. I believe it's the first betrayal of the it's-just-a-folder-of-markdown-files principle.

I agree that VC basically killed Evernote. Obsidian is completely user-supported, no investors, we're explicitly avoiding the VC route.

As far as features go, we're continuing down the path of a modular architecture. The core will continue to be as streamlined as possible. Canvas is like any other plugin, you can disable it. We think that flexibility is important, because not everyone thinks the same way. You should be able to create an environment that fits your way of thinking. However not everyone needs every feature, thus the modularity/extensibility approach.

Did the core of Obsidian have to be changed at all to support Canvas? If so, then I don't think it is like any other plugin.

If this were just another pluigin that you could download and use if you want, I really wouldn't care. It's the fact that it's considered part of the core product that gives me bad vibes. It feels like the project, even without VC money, is doing what almost every other successful project does - expand.

Do you think Obsidian will ever be considered "done"?

You can represent a collection of nodes like that, but human readable/machine readable flow configuration, highlighting, plus composition seems like a tall ask, and JSON is a small extension that's mostly human-readable as it is.

This is adhering to an obvious crack showing in Obsidian as it is: how do you store a graph view configuration? Right now, per vault, you get one slot unless you draw in something like Juggl, which is... well it raises serious usability concerns.

It's just a plugin i believe, you can choose to not use it. There are _many_ community plugins that go well beyond just-markdown, i don't feel this is any different.

Remember, most of Obsidian is just plugins. Even core functionality. Which is a big reason i use Obsidian.

I really like https://kinopio.club/. This canvas is definitely a step in that direction. I hope they (or a plugin) support a feature parity too

I really don’t get Obsidian and why HN seems so obsessed with it. Can anyone please enlighten me? Why do they call these notes “a second brain”? How is this “a new way of thinking”? What are you people even writing that requires this? It just seems silly, honestly. What am I missing?

It's decent note-taking software with useful features and a storage medium that's currently in favour. If you have a use for such a thing, it's one of the best options available right now.

But that's all. You can forget all the "second brain"/zettelkasten stuff. It's just marketing gumpf used to build careers prattling about notetaking methods (dressed up as something fancier).

I have my own knowledgebase in my own format and TBH I'd say it's one of the most valuable things I own. I don't think the second brain "marketing grumpf" is false - once you get rolling, you have a personal treasure trove of knowledge without having to dedicate every piece of info to memory.

I had doubts about the second brain stuff as well, but I am seeing that with the connections I make to my notes using links/backlinks tags while hanging out in the graph view allows me to see connections between notes and helps me with idea generation, so I can see why people call it a second brain. It helps you think about writing in a different way. That has been my experience though.

A second brain is a bit on the nose for me.

I use Obsidian to organize my notes about DIY, cooking, and gardening. For example, I store the recipes I found in a single place. It allows me to adjust them (as opposed to browser bookmarks) and write down my observations or experiments. Some concepts can be applied to multiple recipes, so linking them helps. Over time I memorize the concepts, but I struggle with remembering the ratios of ingredients. Having them written down is handy.

I used to have a local instance of MediaWiki a long time ago, but it was clunky. Then I moved to plaintext notes, which I used for many years. Easy to take, but lack of linking made reviewing them hard.

Localized markdown wiki (Obisdian) is a happy middle ground for me.

I don't think it's terribly special. Second brain seems to value the connections between fragments of thought over the thoughts themselves, that these connections will guide the creation or your outlook on thoughts originating from them, a focus on process rather than output, assuming that the output is the result of the process (oftentimes not true). Alternatively, when you are thinking about something, you can quickly find the related thoughts quickly by this organization that can help you advance it faster or more creatively. This assumes that your past thoughts are relevant to your future thoughts which are oftentimes not the case.

It can work well for technical topics that are not quickly outdated and usually have less transitory interpretations, but not as great for subjective things. If you want to have a consistency in your thinking, it can be helpful, but the value of that is also questionable. The last is more psychological, but if you keep getting distracted by a lot of thoughts, by putting them down there and being able to retrieve them when you want, it lets you focus more on things in the present without being distracted by them. If you are exploring a topic over a long span of time, and need to keep reorienting yourself back to the topic, it can be helpful.

Not trying to evangelize you, but you may not necessarily see the value in gathering random notable ideas somewhere until you put in the effort of documenting them and then see the network effect in action, i.e., new meta-ideas and patterns emerging from linking those ideas in a central location.

> may not necessarily see the value in gathering random notable ideas somewhere until you put in the effort of documenting them and then see the network effect in action

or it could be that correlation doesnt imply causation.

People who have lots of ideas might just generally be better at ideation, have high intelligence, and perhaps also good at evaluating their ideas quickly. Their success is not _due_ to their jotting down of ideas, but that there is a confounding factor that influence both.

People who would copy the actions of successful people may just be cargo culting.

if it's any consolation, I don't get it either. Heard about it a few months ago from someone at a kids birthday party, who said his life was completely transformed by it. He seemed to have the perspective that having a giant waterfall of amazing thoughts with nowhere to put them (until Obsidian!) was like normal for everyone. Whenever I asked him "well what are you writing" he was like, "everything! just download it and start writing!" OK.... Guess I'm just boring?

I wasn't sold on it previously but downloaded it based on this new canvas feature. I'm creating a mind map for my new project and creating notes and organising them in a way that is helpful to me to plan the project.

It allows me to dump thoughts, ideas and things that I need to remember in one searchable and organizable home. Obsidian makes this easy by not getting in the way and it's highly customizable. I find it fun to use.

Same. I've given it a spin a few times now, usually when it crops up here on HN. I guess I'm just not a huge note-taker.

That’s fantastic. Are use obsidian somewhat casually, but this could turn it into a bit more of a daily driver.

I just wish that their sync service was less expensive, say $30, instead of $100. Because that’s the difference between being willing to pay for sync vs using any number of computer sync services (be a dropbox, Google Drive, or anything else) to get synchronization that is good enough that committing to either $10 a month or $100 a year just doesn’t seem worth it for the incremental gain.

I don’t know, it’s a difficult balance to strike between customers that need it enough to pay their current prices, and more casual users a bit on the borderline like me who are no power users enough to pay that much. Price elasticity is not an exact science and it’s entirely possible they have already filed in the optimum amount for it.

Although I wonder if there might be room for a tier that was quota driven. For example a certain amount of megabytes of data or number of notes or some other combination of factors, and charge around three dollars a month.

Basically I would like to give them more money to use their sink service, but I might be in too small of a user group for it to be worth it for them to try to target me and others like me with a specific type of plan.

I guess the high cost of the sync is to subsidize the actual development of the software, not just to upkeep the syncing.

A potential alternative revenue source is to produce enterprise features (like single sign on, or have vaults connected to corporate directories/departments). These features discriminate against casual users vs corporate users, who would tend to be able to afford a higher cost.

Obviously, a corporation would then want more, and different, features vs casual users. You end up developing the software biased towards one or the other, potentially fracturing the userbase. it's a double edged sword to play with.

Dear Obsidian team.

Thank you from my heart. As a designer, I have visual thinking, which requires clear representation of relationships between information objects.

No more fiddling with mind-map apps which cannot offer this level of integration with my vault.

Now I finally have focused workflow.

Thank you again.

The only thing I am missing from Obsidian is PDF annotating as Logseq has it. Basically, you open a pdf and whatever you highlight you can copy as a link and put on any page. Then, clicking the link opens the pdf back up at that spot.

Not quite there yet, but there is an Obsidian plugin developing similar functionality: https://github.com/MohrJonas/obsidian-ocr

is there a video of this feature?

Found this YouTube video showing and explaining it: https://youtu.be/OOZA7APwZy4

I've been wanting a tool like this forever - ideally you can enter/exit these scopes/contexts so that everything above fades away. I like to think about problems in these scopes and then have the ability to "zoom out" to collect/link things, without disturbing the internal contents. Kinda like the C4/icepanel stuff but without so much pomp and circumstance.

museapp.com works like that. Also heptabase.com and many others https://infinitecanvas.tools/

That is fantastic! I've never been satisfied with Draw.io at a cross platform option for this after getting so comfortable with OmniGraffle in my OSX days. Can't wait to take this for a spin.

Tangent: the Dataview plugin for Obsidian makes it possible to query both the data and metadata of your notes using both an SQL variant and JavaScript and render the results in all kinds of ways. Powerful stuff.

Whenever a product allows for end-user extension using actual code it always unlocks so much potential. Even if it’s just for the power users.

With the caveat that I'm very far from a power user, I'm struggling to picture how I'd use this. Not as in I think it's a bad idea, but rather it looks cool but I believe I don't quite understand it.

I think the following is an example of an intended use case? Can anyone confirm/deny?

For my work related notes, there's some hierarchical structure to them even though it's hard to see that at the note level. There's all the projects for my work, and then for each project there are notes, and sometimes those notes have notes, etc. I think what Canvas would do here is let me create a visual board for all of the notes related to my work that'd make it easier for me to visualize the whole, drill in/out in particular areas, etc? Does that sound right?

There are some examples at the bottom of the page. I think this biology taxonomy one is pretty cool: https://obsidian.md/images/canvas/canvas-lunaris13-full.png

Yeah I saw those. It's what made me think of my hierarchical structure for my work stuff. But not sure that I'm really understanding or just pattern matching to something similar but different.

I consider myself a very visual person, and yet I never find any of these very overtly visual organization-type tools even remotely appealing. It seems to me there's... too much friction and fiddliness for something I can visualize myself after looking at a text list or folder structure?

I guess maybe it would help as a presentation tool to show others how you visualize a project. I just hope it's worth the effort. Maybe the others you show it to will be impressed?

I agree, don't underestimate the power of a piece of paper and a pencil. I'm a network engineer and and a very visual person. It's a heck of a lot easier to dump the contents of my head onto paper first than fiddling around with some app. If I need to make something professional to share with others (like a diagram) I always make a rough draft on paper first before using an application like Visio.

It's as you think it is, the main benefit is that it's like a notebook that you can zoom in/out of as you wish.

Some of my more visually-inclined friends use a similar program called Miro to keep track of their projects. At the conception stage they collect links to similar projects, scribble notes and draw sketches to create a moodboard. As the design takes form, they create some subsections in the canvas dedicated to certain details of the project and collect related notes there. Images or links of the work-in-progress are also pasted to track progress and to point out what needs to be changed. Each stage and each part of the project gets its own space with its own notes and when you zoom out you get a nice overview of the whole thing.

Miro can also be used collaboratively, so with groups you can also add in a Gantt chart and whatnot to organize.

My friends were in search of offline alternatives to Miro, so I think there is a group of people who will find this new feature very useful.

Yup, design people are very fond of things like Miro, but this is very behind that. Here's hoping that some Diagrams-like capabilities are added to this (yes, I am aware of unofficial plugins for Excalidraw or Draw.io)

I really wish the UI worked like excalidraw, the interface is seamless and something Obsidian could take ideas from. the end result could have been an SVG which makes it compatible with every other software out there.

Canvas is less of a piece of drawing software and more of brainstorm/mindmapping/idea workbench software. Excalidraw will satisfy different use case than Canvas and you can definitely use both!

I was using Excalidraw for (maybe unconventional?) mind-mapping, and one feature that I learned to appreciate is the ability to introduce unstructured objects into the diagram (e.g. add a box grouping arbitrary links, drop an image etc). I wonder how Canvas will hold up for such use cases.

You can use Excalidraw in Obsidian, there is a plugin that uses it and extends it in many ways.

I loved Excalidraw but I love tldraw even more. beta.tldraw.com. Also uses JSON as the data format btw.

This is awesome! I only recently started using Obsidian and have been liking it a lot, especially since there's even a (rough but usable) drawing/sketching plugin so I can kind of get the same experience as I used to have with One Note. This Canvas thing doesn't seem like it has stylus support or anything like that, but it's still super useful.

Also, I noticed that the flatpak version is currently outdated. Anyone know when that will get updated?

A lot of notes apps seem to be adding some type of visual note-taking (is that the right term?)

Logseq now has a whiteboard feature that is similarly powerful.

One thing that bugs me with Obsidian: I cannot create a link to a specific obsidian vault on desktop (Windows). The thing is I often take small notes and opening an Obsidian (or any other app) is usually too much work for me. Instead, I prefer to create file shortcuts on desktop to just double-click them later when I want to access the data.

The thing is Obsidian vault is not represented by a recognizable file; it's a folder. So there is nothing to click at to automatically open it in Obsidian and consequently there is no way to create a shortcut on desktop that would open the specific Obsidian vault.

Yes, I know, I can launch Obsidian app and start from there but it is too much hustle when you have several frequently used vaults.

Also, the standard F2 shortcut for the usual item renaming does not work and it adds friction.

Have you looked at Obsidian URIs? It has a vault parameter:

https://help.obsidian.md/Advanced+topics/Using+obsidian+URI

Thank you. But it does not solve the issue. The custom URI concept is too complex and alien in the Windows world.

A Windows user would much better prefer to have a special anchor file in Obsidian vault folder that could be double-clicked and treated by the standard and observable means.

This is why .txt files are so popular. A double-click and they work. The specialized tools may be 100 times better, but they often miss one important detail: frictionless entry. If something causes friction, especially at the start, then it gradually becomes a burden a user doesn't want to deal with.

However, you advice solves the issue for me because I'm a technical user and you have kindly presented the information. But just imagine how many of those who would totally miss that.

I tried using the URI-scheme and vault-parameter some time ago on linux, to open specific vaults via script. Surprisingly, this did not worked at all. Even worse, the whole scripting of obsidian is horrible even on the fundamental levels, and it failed on pretty much any normal job. Though, this is not such a surprise, considering that it's complete foreign to linux any kind of integration. At the end, it's a closed space, not like an editor, open to the rest of the system.

Remember Obsidian is fine with files coming in from outside. You can just write text into its folders, using anything.

Not sure how to do this on Windows any more, but on MacOS the trick is to use a Shortcut that captures your whatever (text input, image, web page converted to Markdown, file) and writes it into the appropriate vault and optional subfolder.

Can also capture to, e.g., Downloads folder, and have a cron move it to the vault. (I do this when capturing web pages so Browser can't write outside Downloads.)

Anything that can capture to a file path, can capture to Obsidian.

you can do that using uris:

https://help.obsidian.md/Advanced+topics/Using+obsidian+URI

there is also a plugin for having advanced uris if you want to be more specific:

https://github.com/Vinzent03/obsidian-advanced-uri

Just started using obsidian a couple of days ago and am amazed at how awesome it is. Tbh there were only 2 things I thought were missing for my particular workflow and this was one of them, so yer am super happy that it's now been implemented :)

For reference the other is the ability to view and edit any regular text based file (i.e. .R / .cpp / .py) within the client rather than having to open a separate editor.

Must admit am super impressed at how much the team has achieved and how high quality everything is given how small the company is.

Though must admit, I do miss the ability to do literal space formatting of notes like I could do in onenote but that's more of a markdown / html limitation than a obsidian issue.

I was searching for something like this a few months ago, when i saw an srtist creating endless zoomable-art by using "infinte canvas".

But this polished solution tops any of my expectations.

You've put so much effort in it - just wow! And perfectly presented.

We owe you something for this!

I've been using Obsidian and enjoying it quite a bit - thank you for making this, and for making it freely available!

I figured that I've give this a spin but can't find it in my local install of Obsidian. I've got 'auto update' turned on (so I _think_ I'm up to date) and I can't find Canvas listed in the Core or Community plugins in the Settings panel within Obsidian. FWIW I'm using the "Commander" plugin to customize my left sidebar (so it might be hidden from me if it's supposed to show up automatically).

I must be missing something - how do I get access to this awesome and cool new feature? :)

You can use the command palette "Create new canvas" or use the ribbon item (icon looks like a layout of 4 different rectangles)

I don't know if I wasn't noticing the "Relaunch to install update" button or if I just needed to give it a while to download the new update, but after the update (to v1.1.8) the Canvas feature now works.

Mark my words Obsidian will be the next unicorn.

Obsidian has given me everything I had dreamed of in terms of organizing tools, and now this is the cherry on top! I tried so many mindmap software (many paid!) and they all fell short 20 different ways, this is great to see!

Marginally related rant.

Why on earth is the macOS download a 153 MiB ZIP file that expands into 363 MiB of stuff? Why does every Electron app have to come with its own copy of Electron? I miss the times when Windows came on seven 1.44 MB floppies and you did not even need all of them because they mostly contain drivers for hardware you didn't have. Actually I don't miss the time, swapping floppies was annoying.

But really, is the amount of space, bandwidth and clock cycles we carelessly waste really justified by the gain in productivity and achievable complexity?

> But really, is the amount of space, bandwidth and clock cycles we carelessly waste really justified by the gain in productivity and achievable complexity?

Yes. Space, bandwidth, CPU cycles are cheap, especially for this sort of application. Developers are expensive.

Sure, that is the standard response, but multiply the waste by the number of users, the costs that you externalize by making them pay for faster hardware and more storage and bandwidth.

Sure, as a smaller company, this makes sense. And if they stay small, and want to minimize cost, fine. If they target tech-people, again, fine. But in my view, mass adoption really requires better UX/perf.

Tauri seems like a low to the ground competitor to Electron. Binaries start at a couple MB. Completely cross platform. Rust.

OK, this is nice. I've tried (and failed) to use Obsidian in the past because I have 8000-9000 Markdown files with frontmatter metadata and nested folders that I just can't get it to work with (they are typically called index.md in a nested folder structure, with separate sections and media assets in the same folder), but I also use Xmind extensively for my personal projects, so this has tickled my fancy.

As long as I don't end up with a single folder with hundreds of files, this seems interesting enough to check out.

I'm going off on a tangent, but while we have you markdown geeks here: does anyone have any experience editing it with Vim? Do you recommend any plugins or similar?

The only real problem I have with markdown is that if I have editor soft-wraps, Vim doesn't work that well (I can't properly navigate soft-wrap lines, because there is a mismatch between what I see and what the editor understands as a line). If I do hard-wraps (new-lines), then the doc loses copy-paste portability to something like Docs.

Anyone know how to solve this?

You can always use `gj`/`gk` instead of `j`/`k` to move down/up a visual (soft-wrapped) line. If you find it inconvenient, you can always remap bindings to work however you like [0]. You can even limit the mapping to specific file type (e.g. markdown).

As for copying to other formats, I stick to 80-character line length limit, so when I need to copy markdown text somewhere else I simply copy it from a rendered markdown document.

[0] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Move_cursor_by_display_lines_whe...

Very cool. I was just listening to a podcast recently from one of the Heroku founders who is working on an iOS (for now) infinite canvas app too.

I'd love to hear from anyone that has used infinite canvas in their workflow and found good use cases. Does it work well for teams collaborating on projects? I worry it could just turn into a more difficult to navigate wiki that's organized in a scatterbrained way--like it only makes sense to the person who made the most stuff in it.

I tried Obsidian last year but wasn't enough of a value add for me to make the switch from my normal note taking program.

Now I have to give it another go. This looks amazing.

What a stange comment. Could you at least provide some context?

My new year resolution is to move from Notion to Obsidian. I found Notion unreliable in some situations and tbh, I'm not using the mobile application at all.

This is something I'd love to see built into the OS. I don't want multiple desktops as much as I want the ability to zoom around a giant desktop.

Haha, no thanks. Imagine microsoft doing this. The windows would BSOD every 5 minutes.

I'm pretty sure it'll be running on a Chrome variant actually.

This looks like finally an alternative to OneNote. Since every page in OneNote is like an infinite page or canvas, I use it at work to dump info freely anywhere.

The tabs and folder interface helps organizing those notes. But now when my notes are increasing OneNote don't offer a lot to organize these. Its bad at linking the notes too.

This looks a very good alternative with open specs. No other tool had this kind of canvas like OneNote before.

But still no note taking e.g. with an Apple Pen. Would be amazing if Obsidian Mobile added that.

Very nice! Happy to see this evolution coming from Obsidian, it seems like a more natural way to organize concepts and ideas.

One question: It seems it could be troublesome to have to move / resize everything when adding a new card once a canvas is already quite busy. Is there something like auto-layout in the work, to handle these situations? (like to automatically re-layout cards and groups once adding a new item in between)

There are several layout options you can use to easily align and rearrange cards on the canvas. We have considered a "clean up" shortcut to reorganize the whole canvas at once but haven't gotten there yet.

This kind of feature would obviously not be able to be implemented into a (easily readable) markdown file, so, as Obsidian is willing to go to the proprietary open format route, could someone please consider adding usable tables as a feature? Even simple stuff like multiline cells would greatly increase the usability of the tool. The current table experience even with the community plugins is... not ideal.

I don't think we need to step out of Markdown to improve table editing. It could be solved by making a WYSIWYG table editor for Live Preview.

I haven't tried any of the community plugins - if any of them come close to what you want, why not file issues outlining what needs improving? I've only used Obsidian tangentially, but from 10000ft it does look like the app tends to incorporate the best plugin ideas over time, so this route might get what you want into the app eventually.

Emacs org-mode does demonstrate that it is possible to create a usable interface for text-mode tables.

Org mode tables have a lot to polish though. I'd love to see word wrapping in org tables but the current solutions all leave a lot to be desired

I agree, I'm a big fan of tables when jotting down ideas to compare and contrast multiple aspects etc.

But as much as I like markdown for its simplicity, tables are a major PITA, almost to the point of complete uselessness.

This is pretty amazing. They've basically implemented some of the best features of old Evernote, w/o fng it up like Evernote.

You know, this actually seems like an interesting opportunity to use this locally as a superpowered CMS for my statically generated site. I’d have to figure out how to create a linkage that can be translated to my Next-based resource URLs, but at least this would give me more to work with than just my text editor to manage my markdown stuff.

I've been doing mind mapping using excalidraw, but it lacked an easy way and visual way to link cards. This Canvas solution might simplify things a bit, though I wonder how much "freeform", unconstrained doodling I will be able to do using this. At the current point using simple excalidraw diagram might still be preferable.

Have you tried Free Plane(freeplane.org)? It's a great mind mapping tool.

Is it possible to draw in Obsidian (with a tablet/touchscreen)? I’d really like a digital app for algorithms work but so much of it is based on doodling graphs and automata and diagrams. I really like the idea of progressive annotation of such doodles with a note-taking app, but I need to be able to doodle in the first place.

Sadly not out of the box im afraid, there is a plugin for that though [1]. This plugin is not as advanced as say onenote, but it works for small things

[1]: https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

Obsidian is the tool I wish I had during grad school. Thank you for the continued improvements and dedication to modularity.

Obsidian is by far my favorite note taking app of all time. I always try new ones for specific stuff to see how each can improve my productivity daily, but I always stick with it for all my most important things. This canvas product being opensourced and migrateable is great specially for users that try different things like me.

Cool, can't wait to try it out. Would love to move to obsidian fully, as of now I'm also using Joplin for my main set of notes.

btw this plugin really reminds me of a piece of software that I had seen here sometime. An infinite zooming/nesting of notes was the main concept of it, does that ring a bell for anyone?

You could be thinking of Muse (https://museapp.com).

kind of sounds like workflowy, or dynalist (which is made by the same people who make obsidian!)

I'll have to see how much this affects or benefits my workflow, but I'm testing it against my Bachelors Capstone Project, and it seems really cool to be able to create an Overview that visually creates relations between my various notes relating to the project.

Very cool! I love Obsidian more every day.

Looks like something I've looked for for a long time! Will def try it out.

Can also recommend the excellent app Pureref, which is an infinite canvas for pictures. Does not compete with this though, different use cases.

https://www.pureref.com

So many here complaining it's not simple enough, and that they prefer markdown... My brain hurts

I've heard about Obsidian for a while but never got around to using it. Does anyone know if I can take notes and highlight on a web page and include that onto canvas? That's what I'm looking for, notes close to the source as possible.

Perhaps Readwise Reader with Obsidian exporter can do what you want.

// I capture entire webpage into markdown then annotate markdown.

I'm not sure if that is available out of the box, I haven't seen it if it is. But the killer feature of Obsidian is the community plugin ecosystem. I would be surprised if a plugin isn't available soon so make this happen.

There's the very good tool Hypothes.is for taking notes and highlights. If the Obsidian community can develop a plugin that can obtain the stream of highlights from the Hypothesis API, then I guess that is possible.

Wow I didn’t know I could love obsidian more. I’ve been using kinopio.club for this and obsidian for notes. Being able to plot stuff visually really helps me plan long term (especially helpful for my ADHD)

Excited to see it is JSON too! Cannot wait to try :)

This has convinced me to try obsidian at work. I already use plaintext markdown as daily journaling. So the migration was as painful as appointing my journal folder as a vault, Let’s see if I can make good use of the canvas.

Is it strange that they made a whole bunch of thick clients for what should have been a browser based product?

Least they made a Linux client, good on em.

Edit. Read more, I get the clients now. Wow. Its so rare to see products think about not locking in.

Obsidian is designed to work offline using local files on your device, and us optimized for E2E encryption which so it would be more complicated to do as a web-based app.

How does this fit into the existing Obsidian notes and ecosystem of plugins?

if you want try something for capturing your ideas on mobile, you can try TinyUX.

https://www.tinyux.app

It's grid based, low-fi, for visual ideas like wireframes.

It's on all your devices and of course: mobile What a thing you did crate here is astonishing nad will make me think for a while. In the while i will make use of this. Thank you all <3

I wonder if Apple will try and integrate Apple Notes (I know you can already add text but I mean existing notes in the other native app) in the new Freeform app to try and compete with this

Any self-hosted sync options? i.e. Run my own service in docker container, and provide my own database, be it a blob storage like S3, R2, Backblaze or SQLite?

Anything you use to sync text files can work to sync an Obsidian vault. You don't need a database.

The simplest thing for a HN audience is probably "put your vault in a git repo and push to github whenever you want to sync," though that isn't real-time.

I use Obsidian with my existing Syncthing installation (Syncthing being open-source file-syncing software that you run yourself), and it's great.

The problem with Syncthing is that if you accidentally delete a file or part of you notes, your clumsiness will spread to all connected devices.

Anyone have a video on this? I’m not quite getting it.

Here are a couple short examples

https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1601664161360261120

And some longer walkthrough videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLBd_ADeKIw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3DJKk4ivq4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPescoJzcFA

We have a bunch of short clips that show how to do various things, not sure if they are helpful to you:

https://obsidian.md/canvas#protips

There are some videos on the site but it's taking time to load, I think the site is under HN hug.

How could you do this all this time, me not noticing?! THIS is the interconnected mapping for humans i had in my spare room of braincells, that were still alive at that time.

It is okay because living in a sim brings peace to the NPCs. How can one or a group progress so smooth an idea.

Just one thing: how fast this app starts is a less of a blink.

Speechless. Congrats and i step down on my knees for this.

When Sony says: it's not a game -then this is: not a app in the ordinary way. Needs no praise or downvote. This is something completly different.

'Got to remind myself: breathe in - and breathe out.

Obsidian ticked all the boxes for me. Used it since when there were more bugs than features and always knew it would be my go to tool.

This is great, feels like Miro or Draw.io inside Obsidian. I’ve been a long time obsidian subscriber and really enjoy the software.

Is there a way to access other people's spaces? This would be a fantastic journey across the universe of these graphs.

To the obsidian folks, thanks for adding this feature. It is definitely interesting. Will be exploring this further.

How is this different from Figma?

my only issue with Figma is navigating through the screens once you create this gigantic canvas.

Obsidian is knowledge management tool, you can think of it like a personal wiki. So it gives you some different types of elements that you can place inside the Canvas, e.g. notes, PDFs, videos, audio, and even iframe web pages.

For example you can embed embed Markdown notes inside a Canvas, and embed a Canvas inside a Markdown note.

It's in a completely different product space, so there's that to differentiate them as a start.

They’re building up to these features from plain text.

Similarly, right now they’re discussing how to contain a node-based database in human-readable markdown comments.

Nice feature, but I'm not interested in managing my notes with something that isn't pure open source.

Does anyone know how to actually turn on this feature? I just made a new account and I can’t find this option…

Make sure you're using the most recent version. It should be present in v1.1.8.

Does it work on mobile? Can't find it either (Android)

Awesome! Is there an easy and quick way to convert the canvas into a shareable format, i.e. into HTML or PDF?

You can use "Export to image" which saves the canvas to PNG. We're looking to add more formats in the future.

Can someone link a good Obsidian course?

A lot of interesting Obsidian videos both for beginners and more advanced users: https://www.youtube.com/@nicolevdh/videos

Has anyone got Canvas to work on the Android client? Any canvas files won't show up in the vault.

That looks great. I had no idea this was coming. Now I wonder which other ideas the Obsidian team has.

FYI there's a public roadmap: https://trello.com/b/Psqfqp7I/obsidian-roadmap

Tasks are usually not very descriptive, but you get a sense of what's to come.

Is there support planned for Graphviz? Would love to be able to import/export Graphviz files

Just got the stupidest excited grin on my face from seeing this. Looking forward to trying it!

I've wanted exactly this for a long time. I'm really excited to use this!

its gotten too much love <3

``` ServerBusyEgress is over the account limit. RequestId:ce64eac5-e01e-0071-6897-14c44e000000 Time:2022-12-20T17:22:50.8918472Z ```

Miro is in shambles looking at this! Good stuff.

This is like Notion meets FigJams. Pretty cool.

even the sync feature is built in, which was a complaint of another poster (that might not have had the latest build)

A true gamechanger for me. The way you all did thing - it drives me speechless. I need my time to step up to it. Thank you, brothers and sisters of mercy!

Just in time to compete with Freeform?

hell yeah, I love you Obsidian.

Love Obsidian and love this.

It is ideal. I love it!

Amazing! Great job

this is huge. Would also love the ability to draw on one of these (something like tldraw.com)

still no free search

What do you mean?

It seems to do free text search over notes content just fine for me.

No thanks. I'll use a pen and paper for note taking.

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