Overpowered Canvas

An Obsidian plugin that turns the core Canvas into a full whiteboard: shapes and sticky notes, freehand drawing with stylus support, mind maps with automatic layout, presentations, kanban boards synced with your notes, a minimap, a frames panel, a background grid, a guided tour, and first-class right-to-left support — while every canvas stays a standard JSON Canvas file that vanilla Obsidian opens cleanly.

Every feature is a module you can switch off in the settings. A disabled module leaves no patches, listeners or styling behind.

Includes all the features from both advanced canvas and canvas mindmap plugins , and far more , built by the goat claude code this is the perfected form of ultra instinct.

Features

Cards and edges — flowchart and basic shapes on cards, border styles, start/center/end and top/middle/bottom text alignment (new cards can be centered automatically), cards that grow downwards or sideways as you type, z-order, custom colors from CSS, card templates in the bottom bar, empty groups, per-card zoom breakpoints, stable text rendering; edge line styles and arrowheads, routing (curved, straight, right-angle, A* around cards), floating edge ends, flip / highlight / select connected edges, draggable bend points and labels.

Drawing — pen, pencil, marker and highlighter with pressure and tilt (perfect-freehand), palm rejection, pen-only mode, the pen's eraser end, whole-stroke and partial eraser, lasso to move / scale / delete / lock strokes, recent colors, smoothing, and shape recognition (hold at the end of a stroke). Free lines and arrows whose ends stick to cards. Standalone shapes with fill, outline, opacity and rotation. Sticky notes in any color (the last 10 custom colors are kept) whose text shrinks to fit. Floating text without a card, like Miro's text tool. Infinite horizontal and vertical lines with their own color and thickness. Non-destructive image crop. Lock items in place.

Mind maps — Tab / Enter to add children and siblings, Alt+arrows to move between cards, collapsible branches with child counts, and automatic layout with elkjs (mind map in any direction, radial, balanced, layered flowchart, grid) as one animated undo step.

Vault integration — canvases get properties, tags, aliases and outgoing links in Obsidian's metadata cache; edges from frontmatter links; links and embeds to a single card ([[file.canvas#card-id]]); search inside a canvas (Ctrl/Cmd+F); read-only options; PNG/SVG export.

Interaction and navigation — presentations along edges or through frames, portals into other canvases, collapsible groups, focus mode, move a selection to a new canvas, PDF pages as cards for annotation, custom style attributes from CSS snippets, a public events API, a minimap, a frames panel to search, reorder and present the groups of a canvas, a line grid behind the content (a line every N dots), an adjustable selection toolbar size (separately for computers and phones), and a guided tour of every feature (ribbon or canvas controls; it remembers where you stopped). Every module and option shows up in Obsidian's settings search.

Data features — board templates (your own, plus Kanban, SWOT, Retrospective, Weekly plan, Mind map and Flowchart), kanban columns bound to a frontmatter property with two-way sync (rules: docs/KANBAN.md), and query groups that fill themselves with notes matching tags, folders, properties or links.

Languages and right-to-left — the UI is available in English, Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese and Hindi. A canvas can be right-to-left (globally or per canvas): mind maps grow to the left, templates and frames run right to left, menus and panels mirror — or, in "text only" mode, only the text turns right-to-left and the canvas UI stays as it is. Card text takes its direction per paragraph (also while typing), so Hebrew and English mix naturally; it can also be fixed per card.

Large canvases — below a zoom threshold, canvases with hundreds of cards switch to a level-of-detail renderer: ~90 fps instead of ~9 fps on a 1,000-card stress canvas, with cards still clickable (docs/BENCHMARKS.md).

Keys inside a canvas

Every toolbar action is also in the command palette ("Selection: …"), so you can assign your own hotkeys to any of them.

Install

The plugin is not in the community catalog. To install from source:

npm install
npm run build        # type-check + bundle → main.js, styles.css

Copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/overpowered-canvas/ and enable Overpowered Canvas under Settings → Community plugins. Requires Obsidian 1.14 or newer; works on desktop and mobile.

If Advanced Canvas or Canvas MindMap is installed, the plugin offers to switch off its own overlapping modules. Existing Advanced Canvas data in your files is left untouched.

Data format

Everything is stored inside the canvas file under a namespaced x-opc key on the root, nodes and edges (docs/SCHEMA.md). Shapes, stickies, lines and drawings are ordinary text nodes, colors use the standard color field, and unknown properties are always preserved — so files stay valid JSON Canvas 1.0 and open in vanilla Obsidian and other apps. The schema is versioned, with tested migrations.

Development

Docs: DEV (architecture and module API) · INTERNALS (the Obsidian canvas internals the plugin relies on) · SCHEMA · EVENTS (public events for other plugins) · TESTING (manual test steps per phase) · BENCHMARKS · KANBAN.

Third-party code

Bundled, unmodified: elkjs (EPL-2.0), monkey-around (ISC) and perfect-freehand (MIT). See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.