Notes

Sketch free-form diagrams with Excalidraw, in Markdown notes that the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin can open too.

A drawing is a free-form whiteboard made with Excalidraw: shapes, arrows, a pen, text and images. Each drawing is a note named <name>.excalidraw.md, written so that the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin opens it too.

Create a drawing

1. In the app, choose New Drawing.
2. Or run the command from the CLI. It prints the path of the new drawing.

loam --vault ~/Notes excalidraw.new folder=Drawings title=Kickoff

Read what a drawing says

Search and agents read the text of a drawing and the links of its shapes. Loam writes both into the note on every save.

loam --vault ~/Notes excalidraw.list
loam --vault ~/Notes excalidraw.read path=Drawings/Kickoff.excalidraw.md

excalidraw.read returns the texts, the shape links, the images and the number of elements.

Edit a drawing

• Open the .excalidraw.md note in the app. The editor is the full Excalidraw, and it works offline.
• Images you paste or drop go to the vault's attachments folder (Attachments/ by default), with a name that starts with the drawing's name.
• The shape library is shared by every drawing in the vault. It is saved in .loam/excalidraw/library.excalidrawlib.
• A plain .excalidraw file from excalidraw.com opens in the same editor, and is saved as it came.

Commands