Surface Tablet

Surface Tablet is an Obsidian desktop plugin that makes Canvas usable with a Surface Pen by presenting supported pen interactions to Canvas as mouse interactions.

[!IMPORTANT] Version 1.0 is designed for Obsidian Desktop 1.14 or later on Windows and has been validated with a Microsoft Surface Pen. macOS, Linux, mobile, and non-Surface pens are not supported yet.

What it does

In Tablet Mode, Surface Tablet changes the pointerType reported for eligible pen events inside Canvas from pen to mouse. Coordinates, pressure, pointer ID, tilt, and button state are preserved. Mouse and touch input are left unchanged.

The plugin provides two mutually exclusive persistent session modes:

• Mouse Emulation makes ordinary Canvas taps, card dragging, resizing, deselection, and barrel-button right-clicks behave like mouse input.
• Pan Mode uses pen-tip drags to move the Canvas viewport directly.

Enabling Pan Mode switches Mouse Emulation off, and enabling Mouse Emulation switches persistent Pan Mode off. In either mode, holding the barrel button before touching Canvas provides temporary panning without changing either highlighted toolbar action.

Specialized embedded targets—active editors, iframes, PDF views, and Excalidraw views—keep native pen input in v1.

Controls

When a Canvas is loaded on Windows, its view header contains two actions:

• A pen/pointer action toggles Mouse Emulation.
• A hand action toggles persistent Pan Mode.

Commands are also available:

• Surface Tablet: Toggle mouse emulation
• Surface Tablet: Enable mouse emulation
• Surface Tablet: Disable mouse emulation
• Surface Tablet: Toggle pan mode

Canvas pen controls:

• In Mouse Emulation, a pen-tip tap or drag uses Canvas mouse behavior.
• One screen tap while holding the barrel button keeps native right-click behavior.
• Two quick screen taps while holding the barrel button toggle Mouse Emulation.
• Holding the barrel button before tip contact and dragging temporarily pans Canvas in Native Pen or Mouse Emulation mode.

The first tap of a contact double-tap is intentionally not delayed, so its context menu may briefly appear click again to toggle Mouse Emulation modes.

Toggle On/Off

Dragging and Resizing Demo

Panning Demo

Settings

Surface Tablet includes settings for:

• Startup Mouse Emulation state
• Barrel double-click toggle and interval (250–1000 ms, with a tested 600 ms default)
• Barrel-drag panning and movement threshold
• Natural (opposite-direction) or direct (same-direction) panning
• Canvas view-header controls
• Diagnostic logging

Runtime toggles last only for the current Obsidian session. Each launch starts from the configured default, and Pan Mode always starts disabled.

Manual installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest GitHub release.
2. Create <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/surface-tablet/.
3. Copy the three downloaded files into that directory.
4. Restart Obsidian and enable Surface Tablet in Community plugins.

The ignored dist/ directory is the complete installable plugin output.

Development

Requirements: Node.js 24 or newer and npm.

npm install
npm run dev       # watch and rebuild dist/main.js
npm run verify    # lint, format check, tests, metadata check, and production build

Safety and compatibility

• No telemetry is collected. Debug output stays in the local developer console.

Capturing Surface Pen diagnostics

Diagnostics are local and disabled by default. To capture a hardware trace:

1. Enable Debug logging in Surface Tablet settings.
2. Run Surface Tablet: Clear pen diagnostics from the command palette.
3. Perform one test gesture on blank Canvas.
4. Run Surface Tablet: Copy pen diagnostics. This copies the JSON to your clipboard.
5. Paste the copied JSON into the bug report and state whether the gesture worked.

Capture these gestures separately so their event streams remain easy to compare:

• One barrel-button press and release while hovering, without touching the screen.
• Two barrel-button presses while hovering.
• Hold the barrel button while hovering, touch blank Canvas, then drag.
• Touch blank Canvas first, press the barrel button, then drag.

The buffer records changed pointer states inside Canvas, including pen, mouse, and touch classifications plus raw and reported primary-pointer state. It is capped at 500 events and omits note text. Tagged [DEBUG-ST-INPUT-v1] entries are also written to DevTools while logging is enabled.

Hardware validation status

Designed for Windows Surface devices and validated with a Microsoft Surface Pen on Obsidian Desktop 1.14. Other operating systems and pen hardware have not been validated yet.

See TESTING.md for the validation checklist.

License

MIT