Add sections / blocks to Canvas view

[Jore77]

Use case or problem

The new Canvas view is awesome! After playing with it a bit, there’s only one key thing I’m missing: I have a lot of longer notes, organized by headers / sections and blocks. It would be great if I could add a section or block of a note to a canvas, instead of the full note only.

Proposed solution

When adding a note, the most natural way to implement this feature would be to use the same syntax like for internal links, e.g. MyNote#MyHeading or MyNote^MyBlock. Autocomplete should work the same like adding internal links too.

Current workaround (optional)

Didn’t find a workaround … as an approximation, Canvases could remember the scroll position in their notes (they currently don’t).

[zettelstraum]

YES. The canvas is so great. I love what new ways of laying out data and creating dossiers it brings for us

And it’S not even christmas yet…
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

+1 for the original posters request. t totally makes sense.

A great approach would be to allow callouts inside cards or even maybe add callouts directly as cards. This would be ideally solving the mentioned limits…

[internet_tourist]

Add sections:

![[filename#sectionname]]

Adjust the pattern according to your case, and then paste it directly to canvas.

[internet_tourist]

Whenever I thought Obsidian team slowly turned into mindless productivity corpos, they proved again that they’re still the same geek that also have the same problem as us, and they’re commited to fixed that.

I kinda feel bad for Mr. Zsolt though. He developed excalidraw for obsidian for months only to be one-upped in half a year.

[Jore77]

Interesting! I can’t add such a link from the Canvas UI, but copy/paste of an embed link works indeed. Many thanks for the tip @internet_tourist

The fact that — once the embed link is on the Canvas — it works exactly as expected tells me we’ll probably get this as a UI feature soon

[OGRobrain]

@internet_tourist

I kinda feel bad for Mr. Zsolt though. He developed excalidraw for obsidian for months only to be one-upped in half a year.

I think there’s enough difference between Excalidraw and Canvas for both to prosper. More than that, I think they’ll complement one another. An Excalidraw diagram of Canvases could be fun/productive (and vice versa), but also Excalidraw still has a considerable headstart on the purely visual side of things (unless a simple line with arrows is all you need).

[Craig]

I agree – although there is some overlap between Excalidraw and Canvas, they excel at different things. I expect I will still use Excalidraw to build visual charts like system diagrams, flowcharts, and gaming maps. I expect Canvas will excel at mind maps, relationship visualizations, and corkboard diagrams. I think both tools have a bright future!

[chrsle]

@Jore77

It would be great if I could add a section or block of a note to a canvas, instead of the full note only.

To add to that: if that embed becomes editable, that will be the ultimate.
The Make.md beta plugin has already proven that editable embeds are a possibility. I think it’s just a matter of time.

[I-d-as]

Agreed! I think one of the best parts of the Canvas is that the notes are editable right within the canvas. Since this request has been marked as solved, I would be happy to open a new feature request for the ability to use the Drag note to canvas command to choose either a block using ^^ or a heading using Note-name#Heading-name. Thanks.

Edit: Here is the request: Add editable headings/blocks to Canvas via “Drag to add note from vault” command

[nickchomey]

It seems like we can only use ![[filename#sectionname]] with Add card rather than Add Note from Vault

Is that correct, or am I doing something wrong?

If it isn’t possible, then I think it should be

[pkb]

@Jore77

Interesting! I can’t add such a link from the Canvas UI, but copy/paste of an embed link works indeed.

Technically you can, in a text card you may type embed link, like you would do in a regular markdown note.

[Jore77]

@pkb

Technically you can, in a text card you may type embed link, like you would do in a regular markdown note.

Even better!

[TilmanB]

For me I could not get it to work. Any kind of links with # just lead to a card displaying the link. Just when double clicking it would embed the content. But it is not at all working as I would expect to have that section of the note displayed constantly on my canvas with option to jump there if needed (and ideally being able to edit that section inline).
I believe just having an option to select section/paragraph in the right click menu will be the better solution or alternatively somehow enabling this in the swap page action.

[I-d-as]

You may be interested in this feature request which originated here in this thread thanks to the idea of @Jore77 : Add editable headings/blocks to Canvas via “Drag to add note from vault” command

[pkb]

@TilmanB

For me I could not get it to work. Any kind of links with # just lead to a card displaying the link. Just when double clicking it would embed the content.

Don’t know how you do it. I do it this way:

• Right Click-> “Add Card” (or just duble click) on canvas
• Write ![[SomeNote#SomeHeading]]
• That’s it, the card shows the section
• In the top right corner there is link picture, you can click it to jump to the section
• On double click you can edit the link (you can’t edit the content)

[TilmanB]

For me it looks like this:

When I edit by double click it looks like this:

Perhaps depends on live preview being activated?

[pkb]

@TilmanB

Perhaps depends on live preview being activated?

Tried enabling live preview, still works for me. Don’t know why it doesn’t in your case.

[xvvxv]

You can also use Admonition Plugin to embedd in to block, that you have a nice separation between multipule sections or even sections from different notes in one canvas