I hadn’t tried Excalidraw for this. I have been giving it a shot this week. It nearly works for it. Or, should I say it does work, but it feels pretty clunky. The main issues for me are text and boxes (cards) are treated separately, rather than text within a box. Same with labels on arrows, so once you start getting a larger concept map it can be pretty fiddly to move things around. I know this sounds like a bit of a petty gripe, but when you are trying to get flow and map out ideas having to constantly fix the styling really breaks your flow and you end up fighting against the software rather than mapping.
I think the way Excalidraw tracks text elements eg ^m4TvMX0P could be useful though?
I came after reading about this in Obsidian Roundup, and wanted to make this idea more rigorous and general as it is in my head: think of the “WYSIWYG editor” as having these different types of views:
Lists/Outline
Kanban
Calendar
Concept-map (as told by OP, I just called them mind-maps though)
Timeline
Table
Draw (freehand, shapes)
The “views” 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 are available in Notion and we have 1, 2, 6 and 7 in Obsidian itself now.
These “create notes” from themselves, as opposed to Graph view, Calendar community Mind-map community plugin, etc. making use of available notes to create a “pre-view” of them.
A simpler example (1): working in an unordered list we “Outline” the information and adding a [[ ]] creates a potential note from that list itself.
Next up we have Kanban (2) that creates a visual “board” for the information.
(6) is partly available in two ways: Dataview or making a simple table itself (and that in my opinion is a superpower!)
I would really love all the others too be available in Obsidian too~!
You can do this with Excalidraw, though its not quite as seamless as I’d like.
Here’s an example of a new app that puts these spatial whiteboards/surfaces front and center alongside docs/notes. It’s a really nice UX. https://cloverapp.co/
I don’t know if juggle needs it, but the markdown-like format helps to keep consistency through all apps: Lists/Outline. Kanban, Calendar, Concept-map, etc. It enables ‘refactor’ and keeping names and links consistent.
A good example of such diagraming tools is the ones dedicated to software architecture… .(magicdraw, archimate, etc)
I believe this is useful in setups where you have several diagrams with few nodes each (<100), interconnected through links
Not sure if this adds anything useful to the conversation, but one idea I played with (and am still considering) for the Kanban plugin is doing something like this to store arbitrary data:
- Card one ^id1
- Card two ^id2
...at the bottom of the file...
```kanban:data
{
id1: { ...whatever },
id2: { ...whatever },
}
```
Fair enough, and I think in your example that makes a lot of sense (especially since each note clearly represents a unique Kanban). But for Juggl, those would be like 500kb json files, that are only going to be interpretable by Juggl. I’m not really comfortable appending those to user files I think.
I’m right up there with you on this. I’ll also add, having consistent shapes and colors that represent those notes. I imagine this might have been what you were getting at with:
To the first point, here’s a couple of github threads where they discuss possible changes in the core of Excalidraw, that could one day then come to the Obsidian plugin. If you are interested:
Does anybody know the Post-it Android app by 3M. It allows you to capture your post-it notes board into the app and work on them. It also integrates with Trello and Miro.
I would argue against using markdown simply because it’s not at all a tool for the job and one must avoid the pitfall of being tempted to see very problem as solvable by the same tool just because it is the sole tool available.
Markdown shines as a simple (poorly standardize) format that allows to express basic formatting in text fashion. It comes very short when it comes to standardisation, expressivity (even for text), structure (even for tables) and was simply never designed for anything like connectivity, graphs, being parsed unambiguously, or anything else than simple formatted text.
What’s the added value of using markdown versus just another better human readable but specialized language? The page is not mean’t to be editted in the editor anyway. Pushing ackward concepts into markdown will just lead to supporting exotic and hard to parse syntax anyway, i have no doubt it is doable and perhaps language must be expanded, but selecting the right tool for the job seems to me more important than making a text styling language suddenly expanding into representing highly structured data
I agree that the more and more you try to stretch the limits, the more likely things will start breaking down. But I think there is a difference between enabling completely new functionality with Markdown files (“I want to shoot 4K video and store as MD files in Obsidian!”) and adding new ways of viewing and manipulating our fundamentally textual Markdown content (which is what this thread is mainly about.)
