Last week at the 3rd Dutch language Obsidian meet-up one of the participants showed Excalidraw. This is a browser based sketching tool, that was created early last year (so about as old as Obsidian itself). There is an Obsidian plugin for it, which I first assumed would allow you to embed images made in the browser tool, but I was wrong.

• The plugin allows you to create sketches with Excalidraw inside Obsidian. Using command+P and typing create, you can select to create a sketch in various ways
• The sketching is done inside an Obsidian pane
• You can link text in a sketch to any other note simply by adding a markdown style link [[note name]]
• You can even embed another note in the sketch by adding the markdown, using ![[note name]]

The files with the sketches are saved inside your Obsidian vault. I took a look in one of the files, and they are JSON descriptions of the sketches. They’re not images, they’re text descriptions and as such small flat text files just like the notes themselves.

I’m impressed. I could even see myself sketchnoting on a tablet right in Obsidian with this.

Exalidraw living inside an Obsidian note, through a plugin. I made a basic sketch, with a link to a note at the red pin.

Opening a sketch in a text editor shows it to be JSON