Canvas 2.0
The canvas has been rebuilt from the ground up. It is faster, smoother to move around, and has a lot more you can put on it. Your existing canvases carry over as they are.
New things to add to a board
- Frames keep related items together under a title. Anything inside a frame moves with it, and Present steps through your frames one at a time, like slides.
- Shapes for flowcharts and diagrams, with connections that snap to their edges.
- Checklists you can tick off right on the board.
- Drawing with a pen, highlighter and eraser.
- Diagrams (Mermaid) that you describe in a few lines of text and that draw themselves. Start from a template, or ask the AI to write one from your notes.
- Videos from YouTube, Vimeo or Loom that play on the board.
- Linked pages: The card stays in step with the page/document, and you can open it beside the canvas or read it right on the board. This will have more features tied to it in the future.
Canvas controls have also been updated to match what most mainstream canvas software use.
Templates
A new template gallery has ready-made boards for brainstorming, planning, stories, content, research and diagrams. You can also save any part of a board as your own template and reuse it on other canvases.
Bring your Obsidian canvases
You can import Obsidian canvas files, or a whole vault, and pick up where you left off.
Getting help
The canvas help panel now explains what each item is for, with keyboard shortcuts kept in their own tab. New boards also show a short Get started checklist that walks you through the basics by doing them.
AI That Works on Your Canvas (Beta)
Asking AI chat to create a canvas or change the one you have open has been updated with more options. For example, "make a mind map of my main characters" or "group these notes by chapter". While it works, the area it is working in glows. When it is done, the changes appear all at once, with new items fading in and changed ones briefly highlighted. If you don't like the result, you can undo it from the chat message.
When the AI creates a new canvas, its reply ends with a link to open it.
AI nodes on the canvas are also more useful. Connect notes into an AI node, or mention them with @, and it uses them to answer, summarize or brainstorm. You can also let an AI node search the rest of your workspace.
Inline Comments
Select some text and choose Comment to pin a note to it, just like leaving yourself a note in the margin. You can turn a note into a research note when it is worth keeping.
Comments are private to your workspace. They are left out when you share, export or publish a document.
AI Edits Right in Your Document
The AI Response tab is gone. When you use an AI action on selected text, such as rewriting, expanding or changing the tone, the suggestion now appears right in your document. The original text is crossed out in red and the new text is shown in green, so you can see exactly what will change.
A small bar below the text lets you accept, discard or try again. Press Enter or Tab to accept, or Esc to discard. For actions that give you a few versions, you can switch between them before choosing.
Word Count at the Bottom of the Editor
The bottom of the editor now shows the word and character count for the page you are on. Select some text to see the count for just that part. In novel workspaces it also shows your whole manuscript's word count, and every workspace shows how many words you've added today.
Prefer a cleaner page? Turn it off in Settings → Editor → Word count.
Other Improvements
- A new Get started checklist for workspaces replaces the old step-by-step tour. Each task shows you the real button to press and ticks itself off when you do it. You can reopen it any time from Settings → General.
- AI edit suggestions no longer cover the text you are editing.
- UI improvements