Canvas, whiteboards and handwriting

Some thinking doesn’t want to be a document. Pellet has three answers, and all three save as open files you can open elsewhere.

Canvas

An infinite board you arrange cards on. A card can be a scrap of text you type straight onto the board, or a whole note from your vault — which stays live, so editing the note updates the card.

Good for: planning something with parts, mapping how ideas connect, laying out a project where the arrangement itself carries meaning.

You can group cards, color them, draw arrows between them, and drag a selection to move it as one. Saved as .canvas in the JSON Canvas format — the same one Obsidian uses, so canvases open in both.

A canvas: cards, groups and connections on an infinite board.

Whiteboards

For freehand diagramming, Pellet embeds Excalidraw — the actual editor, not an imitation. Shapes, arrows, hand-drawn-looking boxes, text.

Saved as real .excalidraw files, so you can open them at excalidraw.com or in Obsidian’s plugin, edit there, and come back.

Good for: sketching an architecture, a seating plan, anything where the shapes matter more than the words.

Handwriting

On iPad with an Apple Pencil, .ink pages let you write by hand. Pressure-sensitive, using the system’s own handwriting engine.

Stored as plain JSON, not a proprietary blob — so a handwritten page is still a readable file in ten years.

Transcription turns a handwritten page into a normal typed note, which then behaves like any other note: searchable, linkable, in the graph. It uses an AI service you choose with your own API key, and it’s off until you set that up.

Which to reach for

Roughly: canvas when the pieces are notes you already have, whiteboard when you need to draw, handwriting when you think better with a pen.