Visual Notes

A visual workspace for Obsidian — Milanote/Notion/Trello-style boards with icon tiles, a freeform canvas, kanban, tables, sticky notes, checklists, callouts, maps, colour swatches, and more. Everything is stored in a real, spec-compliant .canvas file in your vault, and boards nest inside each other and inside Obsidian's own native Canvas files too.

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Features

Grid Mode

• Tiles that open folders, notes, canvases, kanban files, or nested boards
• Customise each tile's Lucide icon or emoji, background colour, label, and subtitle
• Optionally replace the icon with a cover image (Milanote-style tile thumbnail) from your vault or a URL
• Drag to reorder; right-click to edit

Freeform Canvas

• A right-click "Add" menu and a left-hand toolbar cover every card type below, grouped into Write / Media & links / Organize
• A slash-command quick-add (/) drops a new card of any type at the cursor without leaving the keyboard
• Connections between any two cards — straight or elbow-routed, with colour, thickness, line style, arrowhead, and inline label
• Multi-select via marquee or Shift-click; group drag, alignment bar, and even distribution
• Group frames — select 2+ cards and press ⌘/Ctrl G to wrap them in a native-Canvas-style labelled frame. Purely spatial (no membership list, exactly like Obsidian's own Canvas groups): drag the frame to move everything inside it, resize or delete the frame without ever touching its contents
• Resize any card by dragging any of its four corners
• Pan with middle-click (or Space + drag), zoom with the scroll wheel
• Minimap with click-to-jump and zoom-to-fit, collapsible to a floating widget
• Board-level search and a tag/type filter panel to narrow a busy board down
• Archive cards you're not using instead of deleting them, and browse/restore from the archive any time
• Drag notes, canvases, and folders straight from the file explorer onto the canvas to create tiles — dragging another Visual Notes file in creates a nested board, exactly like nesting boards in Milanote

Locking

Kanban boards, kanban columns, and generic Columns each have a padlock toggle: a locked container can't have items dragged into or out of it, but its own cards can still be freely dragged and repositioned.

Kanban

• Multi-column boards (drag items between columns, per-column WIP limits) and legacy single-column cards
• Rich-text formatting in items (bold, italic, strikethrough, colour, highlight)
• Due dates — an amber badge when due soon, red when overdue, muted once done
• Sub-checklists inside any item
• Link items to vault notes or an external URL (a YouTube link gets an inline video-thumbnail preview); add tag pills
• Optional per-item icon/emoji badge or cover thumbnail, and a per-item background colour (Trello-label style)
• Drop images or audio files directly into a column
• Toggle the column title; set background and accent-strip colours

Tables

• Insert rows/columns anywhere; drag to reorder
• Typed columns, Notion-style: text, number, checkbox, date, or select (with coloured options)
• Column alignment and click-to-sort
• Paste from a spreadsheet — either merge into the existing grid, or use the footer's Paste button to replace the table outright (first row becomes headers, so headers never misalign)
• Google-Sheets-style cell interaction: click/drag to select a range, double-click to edit, right-click to colour a cell or range
• A zoom slider that scales cell content without resizing the card itself
• Sticky header row and virtualized rows so large pasted tables stay smooth

Sticky Notes, Checklists & Comments

• Inline rich-text editing with ⌘ B / I / U and ⌘ ⇧ S shortcuts
• Checklists support header rows to group items into sections
• Background colour and top-strip accent via the context bar colour picker

Callouts

Notion/Obsidian-style callout cards with a full emoji picker (or free-text emoji) for the icon, plus title and body text.

Columns

A generic, lockable container card for freeform grouping of tiles, sticky notes, checklists, tables, images, audio, note links, bookmarks, swatches, files, and callouts — distinct from a Group frame in that it holds an explicit list of children rather than being purely spatial.

Images, Audio & Files

• Paste images from the clipboard; drag from the file explorer or OS onto the canvas or into a kanban column
• Add from the vault or upload from disk via the toolbar
• Images display at their natural aspect ratio; toggle captions with ⌘ ⇧ C / Ctrl ⇧ C
• A generic File card for PDFs and other vault documents
• All imported files are automatically sorted into _Assets/ subfolders (see Asset Management below)

Bookmarks

Paste any URL for a link-preview card (title, description, favicon, image) fetched automatically. YouTube links get a native-style embed with a working inline play button instead of a plain preview.

Maps

Paste a Google Maps link to get a live, fully interactive embed that matches the exact view you copied — including satellite/hybrid layer and zoom level derived from the link's altitude.

Swatches

A colour swatch card showing the hex value and a nearest named-colour label. Double-click (or use the pipette button) to open the native colour picker, or right-click for a menu of approximate named palettes (Muted, Vivid, Pastel, Earth Tones, Grayscale) to generate a grid from. A reroll button in the name bar picks a new random colour.

Text Formatting

Select any text in a sticky note, checklist, kanban item, or image caption to reveal a floating toolbar: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, text colour (preset + colour picker), and highlight colour.

Drawing

Freehand pen and highlighter strokes directly on the canvas, layered above cards.

Asset Management

• Auto-sort: every image, audio clip, video, or document imported into a board is automatically moved to the correct subfolder in the vault root:
  • _Assets/Images/ — jpg, png, gif, webp, svg, …
  • _Assets/Audio/ — mp3, wav, ogg, flac, …
  • _Assets/Video/ — mp4, mov, mkv, …
  • _Assets/Documents/ — pdf
• Auto-relink: scan all boards and fix broken file paths when a unique filename match is found in the vault. Three ways to run it:
  • On open — toggle Auto-relink on board open in Settings to fix links silently every time a board loads
  • Settings button — Settings → Assets → Relink now
  • Command palette — Visual Notes: Relink all board assets

Keyboard Shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
Delete selected	Delete / Backspace
Select all	⌘ A
Duplicate	⌘ D
Group selection	⌘ G / Ctrl G
Undo	⌘ Z
Redo	⌘ ⇧ Z
Toggle image caption	⌘ ⇧ C
Bold (sticky editor)	⌘ B
Italic (sticky editor)	⌘ I
Underline (sticky editor)	⌘ U
Strikethrough (sticky editor)	⌘ ⇧ S
Quick-add card	/

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Installation

Community Plugin Browser (once listed)

1. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse
2. Search for Visual Notes
3. Click Install, then Enable

Manual Installation (for beta testers)

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from this plugin's latest release
2. In your vault, create the folder .obsidian/plugins/visual-notes/
3. Copy the three files into that folder
4. Open Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins, and enable Visual Notes

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Usage

Opening a board

• Run Visual Notes: Open from the command palette
• Or click the layout-dashboard icon in the left ribbon

Creating your first board

1. Run Visual Notes: Create new board (or click + New board on the empty home screen)
2. A .canvas file is created in your vault root (you can move it later)
3. The board opens in grid mode — click the + button to add your first icon tile

Grid mode

• Click a tile to open its target
• Right-click a tile to edit, change icon, change colour, or delete
• Drag tiles to reorder them

Freeform canvas

• Switch to canvas mode with the toggle in the top-right corner of any board
• Right-click the canvas background to add a card, grouped into Write / Media & links / Organize
• Type / to quick-add a card at the cursor
• Pan by dragging the background, middle-clicking anywhere, or holding Space and dragging; zoom with the scroll wheel
• Right-click a card for options (edit, style, connect, lock, archive, delete)
• The toolbar on the left has one button per card type; click it or drag it onto the canvas
• Use the search and filter widgets to jump to or narrow down cards on a busy board
• Toggle the minimap to see and jump around the whole board at a glance

Connections

• Right-click a card → Connect to enter connection mode, then click a second card
• Click a connection to select it; right-click for colour, thickness, and style options

Fixing broken asset links

If you move files in the vault and board assets stop loading, run Visual Notes: Relink all board assets from the command palette. For automatic fixing every time you open a board, enable Auto-relink on board open in Settings.

Saving

Boards save automatically as you work. All data lives in the .canvas file — no external database or sync service is required.

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Permissions & data access

Visual Notes only reads and writes files inside your own vault — it makes no network requests and sends no data anywhere. Two vault-wide capabilities it uses, and why:

• Vault file listing (vault.getFiles, getMarkdownFiles): needed to power the note/image/audio/file pickers (e.g. linking a note to a kanban item, choosing a cover image, auto-relinking moved assets). Nothing is read or transmitted beyond the file list itself until you pick a specific file.
• Clipboard access: used to paste images directly onto a board (Ctrl/Cmd+V) and to copy/paste cards between boards. It only reads the clipboard when you trigger a paste action inside the plugin.

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Compatibility

Platform	Status
Obsidian desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux)	✅ Supported
Obsidian mobile (iOS, iPadOS)	✅ Supported
Minimum Obsidian version	1.13.0

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Development

git clone https://github.com/danderson1988/visual-notes.git
cd visual-notes
npm install
npm run dev        # watch mode — rebuilds on save
npm run build      # production build

Copy or symlink the folder into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/visual-notes/, then enable the plugin in Obsidian.

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License

MIT — © Daniel Anderson