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.
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!
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.
Does it not ultimately have the same problem? i.e. when you open obsidian, there's no guarantee the files are up to date as Android may have killed the third party sync program. And on iOS, there's no way for the sync program and obsidian to share the same filesystem short of the obsidian devs explicitly integrating
Android does have Content Providers [0], basically apps can provide a "filesystem" which isn't locally stored on your phone and act like Network Shares. Caveat is that you need an internet connection.
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.
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 use Microsoft Word’s multi-editing feature at work. The sync is essentially real-time (setting aside other opinions in Microsoft Office). You can see every change that your co-editors make as they make it. You can work on one file on two different devices at the same time. That is the kind of sync that I’d like.
More realistically, I used to use a custom sync setup with a WebDAV server I set up and Goodsync software. You can set it to sync in file change, and it was fast, with changes replicating in a few seconds.
As it is, the Obsidian sync takes a few minutes. And if you edit the file on another device before sync goes through, you’ll lose the changes from one device or the other.
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.
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)
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
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
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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)
I peeked at the onenote format standard [1] and the obsidian canvas standard. The difference is hilarious. The onenote standard is painfully complex, provided as a .pdf, and binary to boot. Compare to an example obsidian canvas - this is obvious, text-based (I could read it with notepad++) and easy to understand just by reading it:
{
"nodes":[
{"id":"6c711bf8c24c4f5b","x":-226,"y":-62,"width":400,"height":400,"type":"file","file":"testin/2022-10-14.md"},
{"id":"4dd7d04cdd0b379c","x":-530,"y":-209,"width":250,"height":60,"type":"text","text":"this is a note"}
],
"edges":[
{"id":"0c589a4d6bbb06aa","fromNode":"4dd7d04cdd0b379c","fromSide":"bottom","toNode":"6c711bf8c24c4f5b","toSide":"left"},
{"id":"eda9f3edb3ec232a","fromNode":"6c711bf8c24c4f5b","fromSide":"top","toNode":"4dd7d04cdd0b379c","toSide":"right"},
{"id":"abf404722ba48c3b","fromNode":"4dd7d04cdd0b379c","fromSide":"top","toNode":"6c711bf8c24c4f5b","toSide":"right"}
]
}
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
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.
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
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.
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.
This is a pretty grating response, given how pointed it is. It's not made any better by the first sentence; it seems that you are the one confusing two different (types of) things:
> The Canvas format is MIT licensed in the same way that Markdown uses a BSD-type license.
In no sense are these two things comparable. "Markdown uses a BSD-type license" is a true statement because "Markdown", in the context where it makes sense to say this, is a Perl script—a program, licensed in a way that is not uncommon for open source programs to be licensed. Your canvas format is not a program. It's a 70-line TypeScript interface definition, going by your own link:
To call this "open source" (let alone open source "in the same way that Markdown" is) is a very odd choice. It's less odd for anyone who recognizes that it follows a common pattern, where folks with something to sell often openwash what it is that they're selling based on the (not unfounded) perception that having it be thought of as more open than it really is tends to confer certain positive benefits. It's why Steve Jobs lied about FaceTime being an open standard, for example.
Whether or not you're giving any explicit permission to build apps, scripts, plugins, etc. is largely moot—to be frank, you don't have the power to dictate otherwise. On the other hand, if you're saying that you're aiming to steward and participate in what (you hope) turns out to be a vibrant ecosystem built on a common format, then that's cool. But say what you mean, though. Calling it an open format or an open standard would be fine; "open source", however, this is not.
I appreciate the distinction you're making. I could have been more accurate in my description. Markdown states in its own documentation that the name refers to two things, and "Canvas" to date fits mostly in (1)
> Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.
What we have done so far is shared an open spec for the .canvas file format, with a type definition that helps developers understand how to create properly formed Canvas files. We also are giving permission to people/companies to use this format with the freedoms that come with the MIT license. In addition we're also putting forward the intention that there should be a free and open format for this type of canvas data, with some similar properties to Markdown. Perhaps in the future there will be more open source tooling fitting into definition (2).
The goal here is simply to help people feel more comfortable that the canvas files they create are their own, and can eventually accrue longevity as more tools get built around the format. I hope this will lead to a rich ecosystem outside of Obsidian. We're committing to keeping it an open format, and hope to collaborate with other people who might want to adopt it.
The same can't be said about the PSD format, so I do think there is a difference in the level of openness that we're aiming for.
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?
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.
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.
Realistically, only a few people have to do it and open source a toolkit. Also I don’t really think that we’ll have that issue with markdown because it’s widespread and rather well established. This doesn’t invalidate your point, which I absolutely agree with.
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.
I've found AlternativeTo to be the complete opposite of shallow. In most cases its pretty precise in exhaustively listing every alive 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't just declare your interpretation of faster to be correct and then denigrate someone else's interpretation by classifying it as a rant. The comment:
> 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).
Yes there are UI elements at play here. But even UI elements are dependent on the language and framework you have decided to use. For example, it is common on Android to use an expanding sidebar whereas on iOS it is more common to use a dropdown menu. If you are developing a one size fits all app then design choices that feel native on one platform are going to feel non-native on another.
And in addition, physical app speed matters. If you want to create a brand new note and you're not already in the app it takes significantly more time until you can start typing with Obsidian than if you use Apple Notes, 1Writer etc. If you're doing it multiple times a day this time adds up.
If you don't think physical app speed matters then why do you think big companies spend thousands optimising webpages to reduce latency? It is because the consumer gets bored of waiting and goes elsewhere. If another app comes along that offers the same functionality of Obsidian but is noticeably faster, people will migrate to it. Everything is a tradeoff, but pretending framework performance isn't a relevant factor does not help anybody.
Your interpretation is correct: I meant "faster" (and easier) in terms of UI/UX, not app speed. I'm confident the problem I'm experiencing can be fixed only by improving the UI/UX within the current technical stack. No need for a rewrite or a port to native apps, Tauri or Flutter.
Dart/flutter sound good and I have heard good things. The downside is you’re rolling the dice on whether it will still exist in five years because it’s a Google project.
A lot of companies would be really upset at Google if this happened.
Besides Google, who re-wrote several of their own apps with Flutter, like Pay and their Home devices (which some are apparently running fuchsia now?), there's BMW, eBay, STAIR (US Department of Veteran Affairs), Nubank, and plenty more.
It’s open source, so it will likely exist in some form.
GWT still exists and had a release last year. It’s been 9 years since it fully transitioned to an open source project. I’m not sure at what point Google stopped contributing since I see old team members in the commit history.
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.
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 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'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?
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.
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.
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!
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
A dream would be first-party integration. Syncing from one to the other is one thing, but a first-party obsidian application running on the ReMarkable? I'd let ReMarkable hire me to make this happen if this is something they'd be interested in
I'm not 100% certain about quick sheets just yet, I'm going to do a more thorough test soon, but notebooks _are_ supported as of last week, the Roadmap hadn't been updated yet.
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).
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.
It’s in that direction, but I also think VS Code offers more and more flexible extension points.
I was reading the plug-in development documentation [0] this morning and the ways in which you can extend Obsidian feels relatively limited. I hope they’ll add more things to hook into.
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 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.
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
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.
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'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.
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'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.
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.
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?
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.
You won't necessarily find an example that matches your use-case. I wouldn't assume that this was made with a regular note-taker or GTD-style productivity person in mins. Not every tool needs to work for everyone.
I think if your work already involves drawing flowcharts or diagrams of connected nodes, like in the biologist in the example, them it will make sense. If not, it will probably not be useful.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a great opportunity for you! This is a problem you know lots of people have and since you are a technical user, you could probably solve this for yourself and others in the same situation. Write a small application and register a file extension for it (maybe .obsidian). When you double click on sql.obsidian (for example), your app would launch read that file then launch Obsidian via the obsidian:\\ protocol.
Your launcher app could also handle the creating of .obsidian files or (even better), write a plugin for obsidian to export a .obsidian file.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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'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.
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.
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
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.
Is it though? You're probably running on something with plenty of spare clock cycles and extra RAM. It's not like end users are suddenly paying a real cost for extra ram usage when the next electron app comes along.
A couple hundred megabytes on a terabyte or larger harddrive? Who cares.
But why do I have those? My notebook could cost $10 if 640 kiB of RAM and 1 GB of storage were enough. I am of course not expecting that everything should work on a system from 30 years ago, we really made use of more powerful systems to do things that were impossible before, but I think we could still do a lot better.
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.
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.
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.
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