ICOR for Life - Canvases

Think on a surface, not in a list.

Draw on an Obsidian canvas with a pen and the ink stays in the file. Put canvases inside canvases. And under every note, see which canvases it sits on and what it connects to there.

Part of the ICOR for Life suite.

What it is for

Some thinking is not a list. Working out how six ideas relate, sketching a system, planning a video: these want a surface where you can put things next to each other and draw the line between them.

Obsidian's canvas gives you the surface. This gives you the pen, the nesting, and the way back: from any note, the canvases it appears on.

That last part is the one people underestimate. A note you dropped on a canvas three weeks ago is not lost; the note itself tells you where it is.

Getting started

Install from Obsidian's community plugin directory: Settings, Community plugins, Browse, search for "ICOR for Life - Canvases". Obsidian's own Canvas plugin must be on.

Open any canvas. A controls column appears on the left. Pick the pen and draw.

The tools

Select, Hand, Pen, Eraser and Text, in a column on the left. A zoom bar and a minimap for finding your way around a big canvas.

Ink lives in the canvas file. Nothing is written to a separate drawing file that can go missing.

Shapes and colours for text cards, plus plain text with no box at all, in your theme's handwriting, body or heading face, when you want a label rather than a card.

Canvases inside canvases

A card can be another canvas. Open it and you go one level down, with a breadcrumb to get back up. This is how a canvas stays readable once it gets big: the detail moves down a level instead of sprawling sideways.

Finding your way back

Under every note, and in the Backlinks pane, a list of the canvases that note is on, which groups it sits in, and what its card connects to on each.

On the canvas, every note card carries two small buttons, and a card that appears on more than one canvas shows a pill listing the others.

Hold Cmd, or Ctrl on Windows and Linux, and click a note card to open that note in the right sidebar without leaving the canvas.

What it touches

• Canvas files you draw on, which is the point.
• Reads your notes and their links to build the list under each note.

It makes no network connection and starts no process.

Good to know

• Desktop and mobile. On a phone the controls column is hidden and the tools run from the command palette instead; tablets show the column.
• Very large canvases. The whole canvas file is saved on every stroke, so a canvas with thousands of strokes writes a bigger file each time. Split it into nested canvases before it gets there.
• The list under a note reads file cards. A note linked from inside a text card is not counted as being on the canvas; Obsidian's own backlinks show those.
• Beta. If something looks off, open an issue.

Support

Open an issue on this repository. For security problems, see SECURITY.md.

Licence

Source-available, see LICENSE. Not open source. Bundled third-party components: see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.