Excalidraw - Full featured sketching plugin in Obsidian

Excalidraw is a very powerful yet simple to use sketching tool. It allows you to integrate quick sketches, user interface deigns, even simple charts, etc. into your notes in Obsidian.

Search for “Excalidraw” in Community Plugins.

Here’s a link to a 6 part mini series explaining the plugin: Part 1: Intro to Obsidian-Excalidraw - Start a new drawing - YouTube

Here’s the link to the plugin on GitHub: zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin: A plugin to edit and view Excalidraw drawings in Obsidian (github.com)

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Already installed, the plugin works great for me! Thank you so much for making it!

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Is this magic? You must be a wizard!

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I am so excited about this. Thank you.

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Amazing! Is there a way to insert/paste an image (png/svg) inside the canvas?

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That is a bit tricky, depending on how the core Excalidraw product evolves this might become available in the future. SVG is easier, PNG would not really be native to a vector graphics tool like Excalidraw.

I have some ideas to allow a PNG in a background layer.

I’d be interested what concrete use cases you have in mind.

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I was thinking that one the most usefull workflow based on Excalidraw would be to annotate images and integrate them into your notes.

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sounds doable… will play with this and see what I can do

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SVG inserts (like from reMarkable tablets, etc.) would be great

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Thank you for this great plugin! It’s a great way to create and display quick-and-dirty visualizations. Well done!

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Thank you for the plugin! :+1: Is there a way to update the drawing’s filenames in the embeds? I made a drawing with the default filename, then embedded it into a document, then renamed the drawing, but in the embed block, the drawing’s filename remained the same (so the embed was no longer working)

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That is a good suggestion. It is definitely doable. To make sure I don’t forget it, can you create a feature request on Github please? Issues · zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin · GitHub

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Done: Update Excalidraw filenames in the embed blocks after renaming them · Issue #41 · zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin · GitHub

Thank you.

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Here’s 1.0.8-test3.

This now supports updating of transcluded filenames in .md files when the title of the drawing changes.

It also contains fixes for a good number of issues raised on github. Detailes in the release note.

I’d very much appreciate if some people could give it a try (especially with updating of filenames in transclusions) and let me know if anything comes up.

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This looks amazing and I will be giving it a try. I am particularly interested in the mindmap but I have a request which may not be within your scope. It would be great to be able to create a mindmap / tree diagram from notes that reference other notes in an hierarchical fashion. For example note1 has “#parent [[note2]]” either in the frontmatter or in the text. I’d like to be able to use this to build the tree. Alternatively I need to find a way to build the outline some other way and then apply your tool. Either way, this looks awesome.

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So that can be done with a little work. I included the Templater script for the mindmap as a boilerplate/starting point so people can develop their own templates.

What I’ll also do sometime in the future is to link back to lines in your document with blockIDs so I can keep the drawing and the document in sync

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Thanks - that would be fantastic. I’m not a programmer unfortunately but I can hack a bit…
I have it installed now and it really is as good as your video shows :smile:

Eventually, I might get to a point to enhance the mindmap feature and include it in the core plugin… I hope someone else sees the opportunity here as well and enhances my boilerplate solution… I will then take that version to include in the core plugin

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The plugin worked for a while, but now it doesn’t work anymore, I have uninstalled and reinstalled the plugin, but it does not run the application, I must install something additional or delete some file?

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I am sorry to hear that. Can you tell me more?

I suggest taking this conversation to github issues.

what operating system are you using? which version of Obsidian and of Excalidraw? did you install any other plugin recently? can you send screenshot of the error? do you see an error message on console log when you press CTRL+SHIFT+I?