Canvas Plus — Obsidian Plugin

Drawing and layout tools for Obsidian's canvas. Paired with the Note Types plugin, typed notes become cards and edges between them become relations.

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Features

Tools in one bar
Open a canvas and Obsidian's bottom menu becomes one bar: Select, then its own draggable Card, Note and Media buttons and a draggable Add note (N) button, then Text (T), Group (G), Marker (M), Highlighter (⇧M) and Eraser (E). Esc cancels. Click Text or Group, then click or drag on the canvas to place one. Free text has no card chrome and removes itself if left empty. The tools also work in a canvas popped out into its own window.

Ink
Marker and highlighter strokes, with a pen color row (none plus the six canvas presets). The eraser removes whole strokes.

Layers panel
A panel on the left lists groups and what they contain, with a search box and a filter by kind of layer or note type.

With Note Types
These need the Note Types plugin enabled. Without it, the rest of Canvas Plus works as usual.

• Note cards. Typed notes appear as cards showing an optional key image, the title and any properties you list under Canvas card fields for that note type (in Note Types' settings). A button in the selection toolbar, or the Cycle selected canvas note cards between card, embed and styled link command, switches a card to a full embed or to a styled link, the same pill the editor shows.
• Add note (N). Add a typed note to the canvas, or create a new note of a type and its card in one step.
• Relations on edges. Connect two cards to choose a relation, which is written to both notes' frontmatter. Select a card to see its relations in a side panel.
• Key images. Drop an image on a card to set its key image.
• Undo covers the notes too. Undo and redo cover the note changes that relations and key images make, not only the canvas.

Canvas files stay standard JSON Canvas, with extra fields kept alongside, so stock Obsidian still opens them.

This relies on Obsidian's undocumented canvas internals, collected in src/canvas/adapter.ts and last checked against Obsidian 1.14.4, and may need a patch after an Obsidian update.

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Installation

1. Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/canvas-plus/.
2. Reload Obsidian.
3. Enable Canvas Plus under Settings → Community plugins. Enable Note Types too for note cards and relations.

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Network use

The plugin has no telemetry, collects no data, and makes no requests of its own.

If a note's key image is a web address, Obsidian loads it from that address whenever a note card shows it. That is a request from your device to the image's host, the same as for any image embedded from the web. Dropping an image link onto a note card only writes the link into the note, and downloads nothing. Dropping an image file saves a copy in your vault's attachment folder, as Obsidian does for any attachment.

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For developers: the Note Types API

Canvas Plus talks to Note Types only through the API Note Types publishes on its plugin instance (app.plugins.getPlugin('filtered-file-commands').api, defined in Note Types' src/api.ts). The bridge is src/note-types.ts: it looks the API up on every use, checks its version, and falls back to a stand-in where no note has a type.

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Development

npm install
npm run dev      # watch mode
npm run build    # type-check + production bundle
npm run lint     # ESLint

Output artifacts (main.js) are written to the plugin root. See AGENTS.md for conventions.

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License

MIT