MY OBSIDIAN OUTLINING TOOL
For all those who love freedom of clustering and organizing items themselves.
You might find that this Canvas file could replace your file tree from the side bar. It’s just easier to remember where something is if it is spread in two dimensions, and not just the vertical file tree.
Can also be used to create document outlines.
In this workflow, we will import separate .md files into the canvas and resize them to be as small as possible so we can easily move them around in clusters or create a layout you prefer. Maybe you’re designing research or just a mind map based of your notes. This is especially useful if your notes are ‘short and sweet’ i.e or if you are using the Zettelkasten method.
Keep 2 separate subfolders for notes. One for those you’ve already added to the Canvas (B), another for those you have yet to add to the Canvas (A).
Step 1. Create new Canvas
Step 2. open Finder (on Mac), File explorer on Windows
Step 3. navigate to the folder A.
Step 4. drag and drop all files into the canvas. This will create the same result as if you dragged in a note from the vault.
Step 5. Open .canvas file using Visual Studio Code
Step 6. Select “Replace”, and type “height”:400 to be replaced with “height”:50
Step 7. Go back to the Canvas. Select all notes in the canvas that were just imported.
Step 8. Select “Align” then “Arrange in a grid” or as you like.
From there on, you can rearrange them as you wish into your mind map.
Please let me know if this helps you in any way, or how this could be improved.
Further improvement could be great to extract the rearranged notes from the canvas and import all those into embedded references into a new note which could be printed out for review.
This tool still lacks one thing and that’s graph connections. I intend to create a python tool that can read the canvas file, and then add a tag with the canvas file name into each and every .md file that is inside of the canvas. This way, you would be able to see connections between canvas files and files inside, within the graph view.