When is Obsidian Canvas ever going to be actually finished?

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Obsidian Canvas has so many unimplemented features that has been ignored through out the years such as…

  • Unfinished canvas embedding - where the texts of an embedded canvas does not show. | The current workaround is to use Excalidraw as it shows its text contents unlike obsidian canvas. But at its current state it is buggy as it is bashed to fit with the Obsidian Interface unlike the elegance that Obsidian Canvas does.
  • Unfinished canvas link connections - where canvas links is not fully integrated within the obsidian system. If a canvas contains a link to a note, the links inside that canvas are not tracked by obsidian as links or linked mentions to it has to be linked manually from the note itself. It also stops linked canvas from mentioning each other. | There is no workaround through this except creating a .md file to link any canvases to each other (if you’re that determined).
  • Shapes + Handwriting in Canvas - after all these years, there has been no updates to include shapes or handwriting into Obsidian Canvas to take advantage of what Obsidian Canvas is the best at which is freedom. It gives freedom into how notes are organised in visual manner instead of static files and folders. Being able to link all of that with shapes and sketches will level up the canvas experience. | The workaround for this is Excalidraw.

Honestly I am fine with the last one not being implemented but the first 2? They are what makes obsidian great and to exclude those features for Canvas? It totally excludes them from the great system that obsidian excels at which is linking.
This list is a tiny amount of what Obsidian Canvas is missing, and its honestly frustrating that even after 2 years, the problems that’s been called out hundreds of times has not been addressed; instead they have just been redirected towards just using Excalidraw as a solution.
Is Obsidian okay with a plug in being better and more used than their own internal software? Isn’t the popularity and usefulness of plugin a clue that their own software is lacking?

Sorry for the frustrations, I love Obsidian and wish or it to be improved upon. But the lacking of Obsidian Canvas which is a main feature of Obsidian and for it to be left at its current unfinished state is annoying. I know and understand how great it can become but I think its time for the problems to be addressed instead of redirecting users into using Excalidraw instead which is buggy at its current state.

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Sorry everyone after more insight. I have found out that Obsidian Canvas has only been out for a little over a year now. I had previously thought that it has been out for 3 years now so I am sorry for that.

But it still stands that its still lacking and If you have problems related to Canvas I encourage you to let it be known. Driving conversations of solutions is what will drive our community forward into new innovations and the betterment of the software.

Here is a link to a reddit post which has more engagement and freedom with what you can say.
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1amfe1x/canvas_is_an_unfinished_feature_and_it_needs_to/

I hope everyone is having a great day and for more of it to come ^^

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for the first 2 points, I’d like to put in my two pennies.

I personally take canvas as a draft or canvas for a draft. I use canvas for brainstorming, for finding or organizing thougts. But they are premature for being a final answer/document or what ever you call it. I treat them as the intermediate products.

So if you accept this and take this idea into your workflows, I think there may be the workarounds, not for these features, but for your workflows.

I personally will use a note to summarize a canvas, if necessary, as a report or as the final output for responding a request. And to this point, to genenrate a report or to generate a respond is the reason why I created that canvas.

So, the canvas is a good tool, but it may not be the final output. And if you don’t take the canvas that way, you may feel better, I think.

For the link issue… I personally don’t use link very much. My workflows rely on search or query, which is more flexible. And with search or query, the content within a canvas can also be found. For example, with a search term like file:(canvas) /\[\[note_name\]\]/, I can find the canvases which have the link to the [[note_name]] note.

Hope these can ease your pain.

Solving the problems in life and work is mroe important than annoyed by the tools which are used to solve these problems. Don’t get frustrated by one tool, just go on and grab another to solve your problem. Or being more aggressive and contructive, you can try to make a tool/tool set following your own design, share it with the others and help the others.

:smiley:

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Moved to meta, there are already feature requests for all 4.

As for number 1, it’s currently not rendering text due to performance constraints.

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But the whole point of Canvas is to use it for brainstorming, and for Brainstorming all the features that were mentioned by OP are features required for brainstorming at least from my experience working in the IT industry where brainstorming is routine.

We should stop avoiding these issues, especially having a vector drawing experience which is key part of brainstorming and mindmapping.

If you ask me, I would say that it is definitely unfinished feature that should be improved.

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No means to be offensive.

I just wanted to share my experience using what Canvas can do right now, so that the post owner can calm down to find himself/herself a workaround.

Since I did not directly contribute a single line for the development of Obsidian, I respect to whatever the develop team have done and achieved so far.

I understand that it is annoying when you encounter a problem when using Obsidian. You can see my post here [Bug] iOS: cjk ime unable to work continuously in ANYTHING other than plain text - Bug reports - Obsidian Forum. It has been there in the list for 2 years. As it is an upstream issue, I think if people from both upstream develop team and downstream develop team work togather, this problem will be solved. But at the same time, I think this is very difficult as both projects are huge and free to use. I do appreciate if this issue can be solved one day, but to be honest, I don’t have a expectation on the date.

And in my hand, i have 3 options for this situation: Option 1: If I can solve it by myself, I will definitely do it. Option2: If I can help solve it, I will do my best. Option 3: If there is nothing that I can do, I let the team know it and wait with patient. And at the same time, keep trying Option1 and Option2 while waiting.

OK, come back to the canvas, if there is something that is annoying. I think a more constructive way is to not only let the team know that there is something that is annoying you, but also give some suggestion on how to fix it. If there is already a descreption on how to fix it, I think shout it out loudly but repeat the same content will only ease your own pain.

So, just calm down, ease your pain directly and try to provide some contribution or something more constructive.

No means to be offensive.

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