Building Visual Maps of Content with Excalidraw in Obsidian

[@AFGautonompunk]

i haven't looked into excalidraw yet, but learning about it keeps me amazed by how sophisticated technology gets. chapeau to you for this seemingly underrated work (of your life).

[@xocyet]

I absolutely LOVE this! It is amazing!!!. I believe this extension greatly increases the features of Obsidian. Thank you for sharing!

[@ResanChea]

I love the presentation style of video like this. It doesn't waste time and very informative. I'm also very interested in excalidraw, but haven't put much effort into building it into my workflow yet.

[@carsonmoore1318]

This is exactly what I had in mind when I saw the Excalidraw plugin!

[@ryanbartlett672]

Amazing! I used the Brain for about 15 years but switched to Freeplane 5 years ago. Loved them both, but they both had search problems at high data volumes. Data structures were also fairly proprietary. But #1 problem/need was finding stuff Fast -- I mean FAST -- within say, 1-2 seconds across everything. What you just demonstrated has me super excited because it has the integrated map (beautiful visual) on top of Obsidian -- which is blazingly fast so far. Nice hand-drawn look that I'm going to borrow. Thank you. P.S. a video for porting Brain to Obsidian would be a god send.

[@VisualPKM]

There is a script for converting from TheBrain... but it is not fail safe and requires some programing skills (github.com/zsviczian/thebrain2markdown). Once you've converted your Brain, the breadcrumbs Obsidian plugin will give you a very robust approach for navigating your Brain data in Obsidian including parents, children and jumps. Note however that I found breadcrumbs to be a drag on performance (I have ~5500 documents), so I normally have it off, and turn it on only if I really need it.

[@ManasMadrecha]

Beautiful! Such a nice way to organise notes.

[@bc4198]

Inspiring! I just discovered your channel, and I can see I will enjoy many hours of digging in!

[@kennydenvers]

This is great! Impressive and very inspirational! Thank you very much for your valuable clips!

[@infectedmushroom3488]

you said it 3 years ago what I need to hear why didn't I come across this before, I totally failed in trying to come up with an approach with PARA and LYT all these stupid methodologies confusing as hell but exaclidraw is what I needed to use for sketchnotes all this time. Thanks.

[@VisualPKM]

It's helpful to understand methodologies but not to implement them verbatim. I am glad you found Excalidraw and that you find it helpful.

[@mgartner]

This was great, thank you kindly Zsolt. A couple of questions: 1) Can the process of importing links (starting around 4:10) be automated at all? - for example: import all links based on a Dataview query into excalidraw 2) can 1) be set to be continuously updated? - so your MOC would be 'dynamic' - as in, when a new link meets the dataview query criteria, it would be added to the excalidraw Thanks!

[@VisualPKM]

This would need a bit of work, but in short: absolutely! All the required capability is there. See some of my other videos on ExcalidrawAutomte e.g. this one: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mGfNmYSoh7KHrNU And more on ExcalidrawAutomate + samples: here: zsviczian.github.io/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin/

[@crankules]

Minor point - I can't seem to do the ctrl+alt+click thing you did at 3:17 to create the new note from a non-link piece of text. To be clear, if I have a peice of text [[link]], I CAN ctrl+click to create a new note called link. But If I leave the text unwrapped in [[]], so just link, neither ctrl+click nor ctrl+alt+click create a new note. Not sure if this is a bug on my end or you removed this feature for some reason. As a minor QOL thing it would be nice to be able to create new notes from normal text, since I dont preemptively wrap everything in [[]]! Great tool though, thanks!

[@VisualPKM]

The text looks like a non-link piece to text because the page is in preview mode. It is actually a [[link]], only in the front-matter I specified the link-prefix to be >>. In an early version any text could be used as a link. I changed this to [[]] or []() because that is the Obsidian standard. I'll think about bringing this feature back.

[@crankules]

@@VisualPKM Thanks for the response. Perhaps just a hotkey to wrap selected text in [[]] would be enough

[@TatutKhem]

This is outstanding!

[@geronimo6787]

THIS is awesome!!! 😊

[@stoictrader7432]

This is brilliant

[@owlmega-101]

With your newly developed ExcaliBrain, do you still use this method to bulid MOCs? On the surface level, it looks like ExcaliBrain is more dynamic/automatic and works kinda like Dataview. While Excalidraw is more hand-crafted and takes much more time to build a MOC. On the flip side, though, being hand-crafted, Excalidraw MOC can be more costumizable and freer, than an ExcaliBrain MOC. I don' know if I understand these concepts correctly. I've been using Excalidraw extensively but don't have much experience with ExcaliBrain.

[@VisualPKM]

Yes, ExcaliBrain is like a big map of content. It works kinda like Dataview... in fact it is built on top of Dataview. However, I still use Excalidraw based maps of content as well. Here are some situations when creating a map of content in Excalidraw makes sense: 1) you are exploring a new topic and need a white board to organize all the pieces of your puzzle. I very frequently use Excalidraw as a story board for myself to understand how pieces of a topic fit together 2) you want to create a visual representation of an topical area that you will want to share with others 3) you enjoy spending time crafting your own MOC and it brings you joy every time you open your MoC 4) most of your other notes are also in Excalidraw... thus it just feels natural to use a whiteboard instead of a linear document to create your MoC.

[@mhorohello]

Thanks for the video!

[@yazanherbawi7235]

Great video... I come from your udemy course.... I was hoping that you would update the course to suit the new methods even with one video in which you will give us all the modern information from your experiences

[@VisualPKM]

That is a great suggestion Yazan. I will do so. Thank you.

[@yazanherbawi7235]

@@VisualPKM please don't forget us... I bought the course three days ago.. And i think the update will push u to sell more... With my love ❤️ and by the way its a great course "the second brain" & with this obsidian it will be very useful ❤️❤️❤️

[@YannyKo13]

Is there a way to assign a hotkey for Pan Hand Tool aside from holding ctrl+space?

[@VisualPKM]

Yes, you can create a one liner scripts to toggle the hand tool and set a hotkey for the script.

[@weightliftingmedic]

Really enjoyed the integration! Do you think this could be done for RemNote too??

[@VisualPKM]

I am glad you enjoyed this. I am not familiar with RemNote. If it has plugin support, then my guess is, yes.

[@saadchraibi6712]

That would be awesome though, I would love to have a excalidraw-like with native access to IPAD pencil in remnote, with the ability to draw

[@saadchraibi6712]

Great vidéo! When I hover over a link in Excalidraw, I can't see any preview of the page altough I can see it when I hover over a link in my others pages!

[@VisualPKM]

If you are using a Mac it is CTRL+CMD+hover. This is something I want to fix, but I haven't yet had the time to deal with it.

[@EmouAcademy]

It is very nice. Is it possible to download your library items?

[@VisualPKM]

yes, there is a command palette action for that It is only active when Excalidraw is open

[@yanzun4291]

I can't change the link's name using [[links|aliasis]] in my drawing, what did I did wrong

[@VisualPKM]

Try command palette "Excalidraw: Toggle Text Element edit RAW/PREVIEW" Maybe by accident you switched to raw (source view) mode.

[@yanzun4291]

@@VisualPKM Thanks it fixed it. One question. I was thinking using excalidraw as Moc , will it affect the portability of markdown files, like when changing to another markdown based aplication.

[@VisualPKM]

@@yanzun4291 In essence the answer is: It depends :) You can switch the Excalidraw file to markdown view mode to see how it looks like. I think the best is to try it. I started to write a longer answer then gave up, because as I was thinking about this, I had increasing number of ideas of how I would make it work, but the solution depends on your exact needs. Here are few ideas: - you can edit the # Text Elements section of the file in any markdown editor, but you need to make sure that the block references are not changed... the next time you open the file excalidraw will use the block references to mach your changes with the drawing. - you can write anything before the # Text Elements section, the text will not show on your drawing, but will be preserved - you can auto export the drawing as an SVG, the SVG will act as an image map. If your other markdown reader is able to handle svg images maps, that can also be a good solution

[@yanzun4291]

@@VisualPKM Thanks for replying ! You had gave a very detailed ans and solutions that I've been thinking when I started introduce mindmap links into my notes. 😄

[@stackingflow]

Please recommend some books and resources for PKM

[@VisualPKM]

This is a tough one. I am not aware of a "definitive guide" to PKM. I personally find Tiago Forte's work very valuable. Maggie Appleton has a sketch note series on Tiago's Building a Second Brain here: maggieappleton.com/basb I find Edward De Bono's work on thinking very insightful. Many of his thinking tools can be applied as "Tools for thought". On the subject of visual thinking front, Mindmap Mastery by Tony Buzan is an excellent starting point. How to take smart notes by Sönke Ahrens is an important read on the topic of Zettelkasten and overall on the topic of reading and internalizing books. I think I am going to write a blog post or do a video (or both) on the topic, so I can properly collect and organize my thoughts on the subject.

[@chr_aikicom]

so it is possible to add links in an excalidraw ?

[@VisualPKM]

Absolutely. You can add [[links]] , ![[transclude#^block_references]] , [internet links](zsolt.blog) , can even transclude ![[pages]]. Try also switching between raw mode and preview mode.

[@Aristocle]

With MOC is broken.

[@VisualPKM]

I don't understand. please explain.

[@Aristocle]

@@VisualPKM With map of content is a powerful tool. 😅

[@kyle11235]

😎