Canvas Card-Materializer

Materialize Canvas cards into permanent, organized Markdown files — bringing Heptabase-style card-based note-taking to Obsidian, with every connection and color preserved.

Features

• Materialize — right-click one or more selected text cards on a Canvas and choose Materialize cards to files. Each becomes a real .md file, replacing the card in place; layout and arrows stay untouched.
• Structured metadata — every materialized file records its Canvas origin in frontmatter (see table below), so connections stay queryable data instead of one-off text.
• Native links — canvas_out/canvas_in are plain [[wikilinks]], so they show up in Obsidian's Graph view and backlinks like any other link.
• Visual sync — drag a materialized file back onto a Canvas and its saved canvas_color is restored automatically.
• Color tags — a colored card also gets a canvas-color/<name> tag (e.g. canvas-color/red), so Obsidian's native tag pane/search can group cards by color, Heptabase-style.
• Safe by default — filenames are deduplicated against your whole vault, not just the current batch, so materializing never silently overwrites an unrelated file with the same name.

Frontmatter fields

How to use

1. Select one or more text cards on a Canvas.
2. Right-click → Materialize cards to files.
3. Files land in <canvas's folder>/<canvas name>/.
4. Open a materialized file's Properties panel to see canvas_out / canvas_in — click through like any other link.

Installation

Open Settings → Community Plugins → Browse, search for Canvas Card-Materializer, and install.