obsidian-excalidraw-plugin VS excalibrain

I think I have somewhere around 1k notes. Startup time is not my concern as I keep it open all the time. It seems like I bumped into https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin/issu... tl;dr: Minimal theme doesn't get along with Excalidraw.

I use excalidraw for almost everything. Brilliant tool. I already mentioned it in another response in this thread but using excalidraw inside obsidian via https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin has been a game changer for me.

For those using Obsidian, the Excalidraw plugin plays really well within it.

https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

Plug for Excalidraw:

https://excalidraw.com/

https://blog.excalidraw.com/

Which, FWIW, supports Apple Pencil and iPad quite well since 2022:

https://twitter.com/excalidraw/status/1491044642493992960

As well as a seemingly evergreen release of the Obsidian plugin that gets people Doge levels of Such Wow:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/s58d2o/just_dis...

Video walkthrough here:

https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

The team based real time collaboration in Excalidraw+ is just fantastic. Glad to have a way to compensate the author:

https://blog.excalidraw.com/introducing-excalidraw-plus/

I love my setup, and if you are going to spend money on an S8 (I have mine with paperfeel screenprotecor). Make sure to donate to the maintainer of the excalidraw plugin, he is doing awesome stuff: https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

For embedded drawings you can use Excalidraw for Obisidian.

As for community plugins, I currently have only the Excalidraw enabled on my Tab Ultra, but I haven't used it much so far.

The Obsidian Excalidraw plugin allows you to draw and write https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

Excalidraw plugin.

Refer: Obsidian Search, How I Use Embedded Queries, Dataview, Excalibrain

It does not represent links in graph view, but excalibrain is a plugin that will visually show relations between files depending on your own ontology. You could define „treatment“, „disease“, and „side effect“ as your own ontological categories, and define how the links between those categories will be displayed (colors, labels, line types, etc). It takes a bit to understand, but it‘s extremly powerful and customizable.

It doesn't kill the graph, especially in its current state. Currently the canvas does not automatically show relationships between your notes. And even when/if the canvas gains the ability to do that, it probably won't kill off this graph.

Dataview + Datadraw = ExcaliBrain. It's a powerful plugin for aggregating and contextualizing notes by pre-defining relationships and keywords. This ExcaliBrain demo/explainer provides a concise overview of what it is and what it can do. I skipped the setup and config so go back if you need that. Side note, Nicole van der Hoeven's overview of obsidian is a fantastic primer and her youtube tutorials are very accessible.

However there is the Excalibrain community plugin that offers a different way of visualizing links between notes (like a fancier version of the native local graph), and you can customise how certain types of links would appear in the visualization

Happy to share some of what's been working for me. Some of this is stuff I'm actively using, some of it hasn't quite made it into the "day to day use" yet, but I've been experimenting with. (Random personal advice: Never let your note taking tools feel like using them is work, that's the first step towards not keeping notes!)

- For fans of "outline workflows" Outliner is excellent. A whole bunch of outline/indented text movement and manipulation commands: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

- For easily refactoring notes that are getting too large you want to have Note Refactor. It gives you tools to easily take blocks of text and quickly cut them out into new notes. Its not magic out of the box, but its a powerful tool you can use when building workflows with other plugins. https://github.com/lynchjames/note-refactor-obsidian

- Local images is another good one, working with online content can get messy when you copy notes and then want to be able to work any where you have Obsidian synched. I've got it on my Laptop, two desktops, phone and tablet... I want to carry as much of my related content with me so having an easy way to convert remote images to local copies is a big productivity boost when making notes about content from the internet. https://github.com/aleksey-rezvov/obsidian-local-images

- For analysing the content for some useful stats there's: https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis but this is for a relatively specific sort of analysis.

- More general and flexible analysis and graph visualisations are available from the combination of https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain , https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview and https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin ... in short query your notes and note metadata like its a database, build reports and data visualisations, and then excalibrain is a whole thing built on top of that power.

- Dynamic embeds of outside content are available from https://github.com/dhamaniasad/obsidian-rich-links and https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed depending on the style and use you like. While there is a built in functionality to preview the links to other notes when you hover over them https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Page+preview which has a demo here https://youtu.be/dmnVml_jbsQ?t=222

- And a real force multiplier is adding https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands to your setup. It lets you run scripts and prompt for information and really invest time in procedural automation without having to build your own javascript plugins. So you can setup your system so that when you use the refactor to cut out a new note, the automations will trigger, ask you to give the note a new heading, tags, and you have a little script that checks last modified time of the folder tree of text files, and looks at the folder of the last modified time and asks you in that popup if you want to move the new note to the folder the note you cut it from is located in. Or anything else you can imagine using outside automation and scripting tools on your plain text markdown files.

These are just a start and if you haven't already browsed the plugins at https://obsidian.md/plugins I wholeheartedly recommend it, people are adding new cool things pretty often and other plugins add new functionality that makes them worth checking out if they were previously not something that you found interesting. I do a read through of the plugin list probably at least once every month or two just to see what's new, and more often if I'm experimenting with changes to my workflow.

The screenshot mid-page on this web page shows what it's like to show a portion of a graph using the Excalibrain plugin which also shows content in graph form

For visualizing connections, and making graphical notes, you might consider the Excalidraw and Excalibrain extensions.

Excalibrain: A graph view to navigate your Obsidian vault

Check out the ExcaliBrain plugin: https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain