rethinking notes and drawings in obsidian

I often have YouTube on our TV, mostly displaying live webcam feeds from interesting places. This week, the “recommended for you” block showed one from Nicole van der Hoeven: Visual note templates with Obsidian Excalidraw (embedded below).

I’ve been using Obsidian for a couple of years now, and have been using the excellent Excalidraw plugin to quickly add diagrams and sketches to my notes. It works well enough - and is definitely not anywhere as polished as OmniGraffle - but is integrated and integrated wins almost every time. It’s easy enough to create a new Excalidraw drawing and embed that into any note as an image - and then to be able to click into the image to edit it.

In the video, Nicole talks with Zsolt Viczián, the developer behind the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin (which is basically a wrapper around the open source Excalidraw project). They talk a bit about integrating Excalidraw and how you can embed diagrams. And then Nicole shares her screen and shows a note - and then toggles the note into Excalidraw editing mode. She makes some quick edits, and then switches the note back into markdown editing mode. Without having to create a new Excalidraw drawing and embed it. The note is the Excalidraw drawing, and vice versa. Thinking of a note in Obsidian as having two sides, and being able to flip back and forth? 🤯

Which makes sense - Excalidraw saves diagrams in markdown format - more specifically, as JSON code that is saved within a markdown file. And the JSON code can happily exist within any markdown file, including one that has other text in it. Like regular Obsidian note files.

I haven’t (yet) done the full configuration that Nicole talks about, but I have modified Excalidraw’s settings to just use the regular .md extension (rather than .excalidraw.md), and had it save new notes in the root (as I do with regular notes, before moving them to a folder) rather than in a /resources/excalidraw directory or whatever.

I’ll need to use notes/drawings in this way for a while to know if it makes sense. It feels like it will be useful though.