Canvases
A board for thinking in space: cards, notes, links and groups placed anywhere and joined with arrows — drawn in the note where you make it, saved as JSON Canvas so it opens in Obsidian too.
Making one
- Type /canvas on an empty line. The board appears right there in the note and stays there; the note stores it as a
```canvasblock. Scrolling over it scrolls the page — Shift-scroll pans the board — and Taller gives it more room. - ⌘K → New canvas file makes
canvases/Canvas 2026-09-13.canvasinstead, a board of its own. - Click a
.canvasfile in the sidebar, or ⌘K → Open canvas: name, to open one.
Cards
| To | Do this |
|---|---|
| Add a card | Add card, or double-click empty space. Type straight away. |
| Edit a card | Double-click it, or select it and press Enter or Edit. Click the background or press Esc when done. |
| Put a note on the board | Add a note… — the card shows its title and first lines; Open note opens it |
| Add a link | Paste an address into Paste a link… and press Add link |
| Group cards | Add group, then drag cards inside it. Moving the group moves them. |
| Colour | Select cards, then pick one of the six colours, or No colour |
| Delete | Select, then Delete or Backspace — its arrows go with it |
Moving around
- Drag a card to move it; Shift-click to select several and drag them together.
- Drag the square in a selected card’s corner to resize it.
- Drag the dot on a selected card’s right edge onto another card to draw an arrow. Click an arrow to select it.
- Drag the background to move the board. Scroll to pan; pinch, or ⌘/Ctrl-scroll, to zoom. Fit shows everything.
The file
Every change is saved a moment later. The file is JSON Canvas, the open format Obsidian uses, so a board made here opens there and the other way round, and fields another app wrote are kept. A file that is not a canvas is never opened as an empty board, so it cannot be overwritten by accident.