"Obsidian" Canvas on STEROIDS: Excalidraw 1.9.5 Release  ## Metadata - Author: [[Zsolt's Visual Personal Knowledge Management]] - Full Title: "Obsidian" Canvas on STEROIDS: Excalidraw 1.9.5 Release - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #Obsidian - #Excalidraw - #ProductivityTools Author: Jolt Source: YouTube Reference: ["Obsidian" Canvas on STEROIDS: Excalidraw 1.9.5 release](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs) date created: 2025-08-23 22:25 --- # Title: Excalidraw 1.9.5: Transforming Obsidian Canvas with Frames and File Embeds ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) --- ## 📝 Summary: Excalidraw 1.9.5 supercharges Obsidian Canvas with **frames** and a new **Insert Any File from The Vault** feature. Users can embed and interact with PDFs, kanban boards, tweets, YouTube videos, and even ChatGPT conversations directly inside Obsidian. Customization options include **theme control, border styles, drag-and-drop shortcuts, and frontmatter overrides**. The release is a **minimum viable product** with some rough edges but opens huge opportunities for interactive note-taking, research workflows, and project management. --- ## 📖 Main Content: The video highlights two headline features: 1. **Frames** – allowing users to group, move, and style multiple elements. 2. **Vault File Embeds** – enabling interactive imports of Markdown, PDFs, kanban boards, media, and web content. It also introduces **drag-and-drop iframe embedding, cross-theme customization, and live embeds of conversations or social content**. While still in MVP form, the integration significantly enhances **interactivity, visualization, and productivity inside Obsidian**. ### 🗒️ Notes - [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&t=0) **Frames** - Group elements together, move them as one unit. - Frame properties: opacity, layering, delete/clear functions. - [01:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&t=80) **Insert Any File Button** - Import Markdown/PDFs as editable iframes. - Resize, rotate, style, or annotate embedded documents. - [02:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&t=154) **File Variety** - PDFs: embed as image or interactive PDF. - Kanban boards: fully editable as iframes. - Videos: playable inside Canvas. - [05:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&t=307) **Iframe Customization** - Border colors, corner styles. - Theme matching: Excalidraw vs Obsidian. - Frontmatter overrides allow file-specific themes. - [07:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&t=471) **Drag-and-Drop Shortcuts** - Windows: Ctrl+Shift embeds as iframe. - Mac: Ctrl key. - Detailed key table in plugin README. - [10:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&t=620) **Interactive Embeds** - YouTube videos playable within Canvas. - Tweets imported and interactive. - Web pages fully browsable inside notes. - [12:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&t=772) **ChatGPT Integration** - Embed chats, continue conversations inline. - Ideal for research + mind maps. - [15:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&t=921) **Full-featured Canvas** - Combine drawing + embedded active elements. - Frames always on top (limitation). - [18:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&t=1080) **MVP Release** - Stable but rough around edges. - User feedback encouraged via GitHub. --- ## 📖 References: - Excalidraw Plugin Documentation (Obsidian Community Plugins) - Obsidian 1.9.5 Release Notes - GitHub Issue Tracker for Excalidraw --- ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. Original: *“The frame tool allows framing of elements and moving them together.”* Paraphrase: The new frame feature lets users group items and manipulate them collectively, simplifying organization. 2. Original: *“Conversations can be continued and saved in the web embed, useful for research and mind mapping.”* Paraphrase: ChatGPT conversations embedded in Canvas remain interactive, making them valuable for ongoing studies or brainstorming. --- ## 📰 Newsletter: 🚀 **Obsidian Power Users Rejoice!** The **Excalidraw 1.9.5 release** just landed, and it’s packed with game-changing features: - 🖼️ **Frames**: Group, style, and move notes as one. - 📄 **File Embeds**: Import PDFs, kanban boards, even YouTube & Tweets right into your Canvas. - 🎨 **Themes & Borders**: Full iframe customization, with light/dark overrides. - 🔗 **Interactive Research**: Embed ChatGPT convos & web pages for living documents. Yes, you can now play videos in your notes. Yes, you can edit kanban boards inline. Yes, this is wild. 👉 [Watch the full demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs) --- ## ✅ Action Items: - Highlight this in **open-source education workshops**: show how Obsidian + Excalidraw supports **interactive learning styles**. - Incorporate **kanban embeds** for WordPress contributor workflows in WPCC and GoDaddy OSPO projects. - Use **frames** in presentations to demonstrate grouping of OSS metrics or governance structures. - Show how **ChatGPT embeds** support ongoing research and documentation. --- ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - H1: Embedding interactive media improves **knowledge retention** in note-taking workflows. - H2: Frames reduce **cognitive load** by grouping related elements visually. - H3: Integrating research tools (ChatGPT, tweets) into Canvas accelerates **decision-making**. ### 📊 Methodology: - User testing: Compare retention between static vs. interactive notes. - Task analysis: Measure speed of completing workflows using frames. - Surveys: Gather researcher satisfaction when using embedded tools. ### ❓ Questions: - Can Obsidian replace standalone kanban/project tools for OSS workflows? - How does embedding media affect performance at scale? - Will users adopt frames over tags/links for organization? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Explore embedding **live dashboards** (e.g., GitHub issues, CHAOSS metrics). - Study cognitive benefits of multimodal note-taking. - Investigate collaboration potential with interactive embeds. ### 💡 Implications: - For OSS: Could improve contributor onboarding via interactive guides. - For education: Richer multi-format resources directly in note-taking apps. - For productivity: Bridges personal knowledge management with project execution. --- ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: - Visual: ✅ Strong—frames, embeds, customization. - Aural: ❌ Lacking—recommend audio/video transcription. - Verbal: ✅ Clear walkthrough with practical examples. - Physical: ✅ Interactive (drag-and-drop, hotkeys). - Logical: ✅ Keybinding tables, systematic instructions. - Social: ❌ Minimal—no direct collaborative aspect yet. - Solitary: ✅ Strong—personal customization of embeds. - Naturalistic: ❌ Not addressed. --- ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - Screen Reader: ❌ Limited—iframes may not expose alt-text. - Keyboard Navigation: ❌ Some drag-and-drop heavy. - Contrast: ✅ Theming support aids readability. - Text Resizing: ✅ Obsidian-native resizing works. **Improvements**: Add alt-text, keyboard shortcuts for all actions, ARIA labels for embeds. --- ## 🌍 DEIB Assessment: - Cultural Relevance: ❌ Tech-centric, lacks diverse examples. - Inclusive Language: ✅ Neutral and accessible. - Neurodiversity: ❌ Dense instructions; should chunk steps. - Representation: ❌ Limited to technical use cases. - Psychological Safety: ✅ Supportive, enthusiastic tone. --- ## ✅ Logical Validity: - **Strengths**: - Causal reasoning (frames → easier organization). - Inductive reaso - Summary: The Excalidraw 1.9.5 release includes new features for creating frames and embedding files from Obsidian. The release allows for the addition of various files, including PDFs, podcasts, and Kanban boards, as iframes. Users can now drag and drop files from their Vaults and adjust their size, add stroke colors, and change backgrounds. The Excalidraw plugin also allows for editing and moving cards on a Kanban board within Obsidian. It is important to note that the features are only available for Obsidian desktop. - URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ICpoyMv6KSs&feature=share hey everyone jolt here I am superexcited about today's video and about exCollege raw obsidian 1.9.5this is going to blow your mindlet me show youthe 1.9.5 release is all about frameslet me show you first the one that'seasier to demonstrate and that was addedto obsidian by the ex collateral productteam a couple of days ago if you click here under more tools youwill see the frame tool if you click onthe frame tool you can simply frame anumber of elements and once theseelements are framed you can move thoseframes together and you can do all sortsof settings on the frame for example youcan change the opacity of the frame oryou can bring frames back and forth youcan also simply move items out of the frameor into the frame as well as with theright click you can remove all elementsin the frame or select all elements inthe frame or just simply delete theentire frame I'm going to do that nowso now let's move on to the trulyexciting stuff you will notice thatthere's a new button here this is theinsert any file from The Vault button ifI click this then this dialog box will open up I can just type in the name ofthe document secure enough I can selectwhich section I want to open trust noone and I can click here to import it asan iframe and when I do that then aniframe is created if I click here then Ican scroll in the document and if Iclick again then I can edit the documentright now then I editthe document Scrolls to the beginning thisis a known issue I'mhave a promise from the obsidian teamthat this is going to be resolvednow of course you can also resize thisif you want you can even rotate it ifyou want now if you rotate you can readthe document but you cannot edit thedocument when rotated so to rotate itback you need to hold the shift key and rotate it to a horizontal position youcan also do some settings if you likeyou can add a stroke color maybe aroundthis and you can make the corners roundif you want and this way I've formattedmy document and I can put this to theside now if I use the command palettenow and type in any then you will see Ihave this action as well so you canassign a hotkey for yourself I willclick insert any file from The Vault and I'm going to look for a PDF file how toread a paragraph I'm going to pressenteragain you will notice that previously aswell there were two buttons so still youcan also import a markdown file as animage and also with a PDF document youcan import it as a PDF which will haveall its create features I'll include a link here in the video that explains howthe PDF import feature works because Ithink that's also super super superuseful but now I'm going to show you howto import this as an iframe so when Iclick here to import it as an iframethen now it's not a big surprise it isgoing to be very similar so if I clickhere I can scroll in the document andthis is I think a pretty good works very well now I think the fun stuff startshere so let me again bring up the insertany file from The Vault and let's lookat our demo kombbomb board so you canalso import an obsidian comb board andI'm going to import this as an iframeand this time I'm going to make thisjust slightly bigger I'm going to maybemove down to here and the nice thing is that this compound board is actuallyfully functional so if I click here Ican move maybe this card to here I canmove this card to here and with this I'mable to edit my kanban board on the Flyhere within obsidianand similarly I can show you that alsofrom your Vault you can importand the other file I didn't try that many things but I tried MP4s so I don'thave many videos in My Demo Vault thisis from an old blog post but again if Iimport this as an iframe then you willsee it is not perfect so the size of theframe is not perfect but I can clickhere and start playing and now thisvideo is playing in the background andagain I can just set the Border color to whatever I want and or the border andalso the Border color if I want tochange it so this is now here and nicenow the color the background color orthe theme of the documents that youimport will depend on your Excaliburtheme so right now I'm using excaled rawin light mode if I switch to dark modethen you will see that all of the documents and everythingwas and now turned to the Dark themealso you can control this so ifregardless of the theme of the documentyou would rather follow the theme ofobsidian there is a setting in excalildraw plugin settings under display andhere under display you can change thisthat iframes should match the obsidiantheme so if I turn this off and come back then everything is going to be darkbut the background is going to be lightbecause this is my excalator themenow also you can override this on a filelevel you need to open the document inmarkdown mode and you can add aformatter key to control how the framesare displayed so this case I'm going toopen thedrawing as a markdown document and here in the front matter I'm going toType X colored raw iframe and you cansee there are four values you can setthis to dark light Auto and defaultdefault means it follows your obsidiantheme Auto is automatically adjusted tothe excalator theme and if I set this tolight as fixed so I'm going to set this to light then regardless of myplugin settings the frames are going tobe loaded with by light themesso now let's look at also drag and dropbecause drag and drop also works so I'mgoing to just take this document righthere and I'm going to drop it here butbefore I drop it notice the tool tipthere it says insert link and try shift Control Alt combinations to to find outthe drop actions on Windows you need topress Ctrl shift to insert something asan iframe so now I'm holding the mousebutton I'm dragging this file and as I'mdragging it then I'm over the excalatorarea where I want to drop it I pressCtrl shift and I let go the mouse buttonand then my document is imported like this now I can also show you thekey combination so there are you willfind this table in the X call it rolereadme I'll show you in just one secondthere that is but here you can see thatthere are two new key combinations socombination number oneis when you'redragging and dropping a file from withinobsidian and here I just showed you that on Windows it's Ctrl shift on a Mac it'sthe control button and then it will dropit as an iframe and when we drop thisfrom the internet then it's Ctrl shiftand Ctrl shift on both Mac and windowsI'll show you in just a second how thatworks and as I promised so this table isavailable in the X collateral readme youwill find the X College row read me if you open settings you go to communityplugins you search for X colored rawhere and you click on X color drawthen this will open the readme and ifyou scroll down in the readme you willfind this table right here so anytimeyou need to get back to this you willfind it here so getting back to ourstory I'm going to minimize this solet's look at some of the web drag and drops so let's start with this examplethat I have a YouTube video that I wantto bring in here so I'm going to grabthe YouTube video and I'm going to justuhmove it over X color draw and then I'mgoing to press Ctrl shift to drop it inhere and with that the video is inand of course as you would expect if you click the center it's going to startplaying and you can see it has athick border which means that the videois active so you can now move in thevideo if I click anywhere out then thevideo is no longer I mean the video isplaying but it's no longer active so youcan resize it if you want orand do any other Transformations maybeyou can rotate this as well if you click the center again then it will stop andif you click it again then it willcontinue so this I think is prettyuseful when you're taking notes on avideo in X colored row and you just wantto start and stop the video now movingon from a video let me show you how thiswork with a Twitter tweet so for exampleI want to bring this tweet into mydocument I can click here to share the tweet I can copy the link to the tweetand I can come here and I can justsimply paste the tweet and when I pastethe Tweet so I select it paste then theTweet was imported and I can interactwith the tweet I can also again enlargethe Tweet if I want to so this becomeshere another and interactive documentand also I can bring in web pages so let me just show you another way to do thisnow this is going to be the obsidian webpage so I can just simply drag the webpage Ctrl shift and I can drop the webpage in here and now I have the obsidianweb page here I think a cool feature andit'ssort of the consequence of being able to embed and this will only work inobsidian desktop this way in obsidianmobile I think the full feature will notbe available but let me show you what Imean so you can alsouse applications that need an identityso this is my chat GPT account and whatI want to do or show you is a newfeature in chai GPT is you canshare a chat so I'm going to copy the link to this chatand once I've copied the link to thechat I'm going to now use the web embedfeature this is I could just simplypaste the link here as I did in theother cases I just want to show youanother way of creating a frame so I canclick here on web embed I can create anempty embed form and I'm just going toSimply paste the link here that I picked up from chai GPT and when I press enterthen this dialog is imported so you cansee here that this is my discussion of achai GPT and if I click here to continueconversation then I can actuallycontinue my conversation so imagine theuse case that you're doing some researchyou insert your chain GPT conversation here you do a mind map around it andwhenever you have additional questionsyou can just continue that conversationand that conversation is going to besaved here that you're drawinganother example would be and this is Ithink just for the fun of it but there'salso a cool additional feature that I'lltalk about in a next video thatyou can do with this but here if I create another web frame and now I'mgoing tojust simply type excalator.com then whatyou will see here is this is now a webinstance of EX College row that wasimported and actually if I click herethen this instance is going to work justas your normal web instance of X call itrobot so you can actually have an embedded x-colored raw drawing and youcanalso sort of embedded here now thisbrings me to a point thatright now is deliberately not supportedso here if I click to add a document andI choose maybe Boston boxX College Rawthis one here then this is an ex College roll drawing that I can only import asan image so this is now imported as animage I will eventually come to a pointwhere you can embed an excluded drawingin a similar way within obsidian rightnow there were some minor issues and Idecided that for now I would ratherrelease this set of features to youinstead of trying to work out all thenitty-gritty details of every single piece of functionalitysoand then when you have everything hereor you've moved your items in here ofcourse everything that works in Xcollateral still works here so I canconnect these items with one anothermaybe like this I can add acurved line I can add a relationship now this text is a bit small and Iprobably mistyped a relationship butanyway you can see that you can connectitems you can also add variouscomponents around these so I can addthis box for example here and I can alsosimply addadditional textand so on so this nowof course the spellingspelling is not great as I'm just tryingto do all of this here on the fly butyou get the idea so you have a fullfeatured let's call it rawcanvasplus all of these embedded activeelementsnow there is a bit ofspecial feature of these frames and a special feature is that here I haveadditional text that is covered by thisFrame even if I bring additional text tothe front the frames are always going tobe on the top so that is currently alimitationalso if I embed this whole thing into adocument so let me just create a new empty document right here and let mejust drag this in here and embed itlike this you will see that everythingis embedded with a let me just make thislargergoing to make thisbig like this so you will see that allof these items were imported but we only have placeholdersfor most of the things this is going tostay as is for some of the items likethe dose for example I hope to be ableto add a preview later on but again thisis something on the roadmap does notwork for nowso that's all I wanted to share with youtoday I hope you're as excited about allof this as I am I think this is really mind-blowing and opens so manyopportunities for excalator and obsidianthis is a minimum viable product releaseI think it works stable it does the jobbut there are a number of rough edgessome things don't always work asintended so I ask for your patience ifyou find something check GitHub if noone has reported it please report it I'll try to refine this solution overthe next couple of weeks but I thoughtthat I've been working on this for thebetter part of the last month and Ithought that instead of continuing towork in the background on this I wouldrelease it let you use it and continueto work based on your feedback so enjoyand let me know how it all works out I'dbe very interested to hear the type of solutions that you cancreate with this if you create a YouTubevideo or if you post on Twitter or youpost in Discord or you share in thecomments below I'd love to see what youdo with excalator obsidian using theseintegration featuresthank you, "Obsidian" Canvas on STEROIDS: Excalidraw 1.9.5 Release, Zsolt's Visual Personal Knowledge Management, 01h3tgtmten5eskrm9xxbvve31.