Note Canvas

Notes are the heart of the board, and they are real notes— not copies. A note card mirrors its source document: the board shows a snapshot, and writing happens in the full Notes editor with everything you already have there (autosave, themes, AI, comments, tasks).

• From a note: open the ⋯ menu → Add to a canvas, then pick a board or create one. The note lands as a card and you jump straight to the board.
• From the board: add a note card to create a fresh note (it opens in its own tab), or bring in an existing one with the note picker.
• Round trip: a note opened from a board carries an “On board” chip in its header that links right back to the canvas it came from.

The mirror keeps itself fresh — when the board loads, when you return to its tab, and live while it's open. Long notes are trimmed by whole blocks on the card (and say so); the full note is always one double-click away.

Drag between the dots on two cards to connect them. Lines carry a label, a shape(curved, stepped, straight, or wavy), a stroke style (solid, dashed, dotted), a width, and optional arrowheads — every style option shows a live preview of itself, and you can set a default for new lines.

Framesgroup cards into named clusters. A line between two cards inside the same frame inherits the frame's color, so a cluster reads as one idea at a glance. Card color is yours to assign from a curated palette — use it to mean whatever helps you think (“green is decided, red needs work”).

The Note Canvashub lists every board with a real thumbnail of its actual layout — boxes, lines, and the words on your biggest cards — so two boards never look alike. Views: All, Starred, and Archived.

• Archiveputs a finished board away without changing anything on it — it leaves the shelf but still opens by URL, and restores in one click.
• Deleteis reversible — an Undo toast brings the whole board back, cards and all.
• Open boards line up in a tab bar at the top of the canvas. Pin the ones you keep coming back to; closing a tab never deletes the board.

A board leaves in whatever shape you need it in. Open the board's ⋯menu (or a board's menu on the hub) and choose Export— every option says in one line what opens it, so you never have to guess from a file extension.

• Markdown— one document. Opens in Obsidian, Notion, VS Code, or any text editor.
• Obsidian vault — a zipped folder of linked notes, one per card, with frames as folders and connections as [[wiki-links]]. Unzip it into a vault and your board is a graph you can walk.
• Canvas layout — the board's own arrangement in JSON Canvas, the open format Obsidian reads and writes. Drop the .canvas file into a vault to see the same board there, or bring it back here with Import.
• Web page— a single self-contained page. Open it in a browser, print it, or send it to someone who has none of these tools.
• Raw data— every field exactly as stored, for a backup or your own tooling.

Note cards export in full— not the trimmed snapshot you see on the card. Markdown, the vault, and the web page all pull the whole document behind each note, and anything that couldn't be included says so rather than going missing quietly. To take one note on its own, right-click its card and choose Export note.

A board isn't only for you to look at. Connect OpenCharts as an MCP serverand any MCP client — Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Warp, VS Code — can read your boards, follow the thinking on them, and add to it.

• It reads the shape, not just the words. A board comes back as a graph: every card, and the labeled connections between them. Point at a conclusion and ask what supports it, and the agent walks the lines upstream to gather exactly the cards feeding it.
• It reads your notes in full. The graph carries a short excerpt per card plus a pointer to the real document, and says so — so an agent knows to go and read the whole note before answering, instead of confidently reporting that something isn't there.
• It writes back. An agent can append findings to the note behind a card. It writes the note, never the card — so the board catches up on its own and your document keeps its full history in Notes.
• It can build. Create a board, add cards, connect them, group them into frames, and tidy the whole layout — and you never hand it coordinates. Cards are placed relative to other cards (“below this one, inside that frame”) and the arithmetic is ours.
• Or attach it and forget it. Boards are also MCP resources, so a client can keep one attached as background context on every turn — the way a vault is just always there — rather than fetching it each time.

Set it up on the Developers → MCP page: create a key, paste one config block into your tool, done. Reading a board needs the read scope; adding to one needs write. See MCP Server for the full tool list.

Prefer to keep it offline? The Obsidian vault export above gives a local tool the same graph as a folder of linked files, with no connection to us at all.

• Boards are private to you— sharing and collaboration aren't part of Note Canvas yet.
• Link previews are extracted content, never embedded pages — an idle board makes zero third-party requests, and YouTube only loads when you press play.
• Deleting a note cardnever deletes the note itself — the document stays right where it lives in Notes.