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.

Export and Import live in the board’s ⋯ menu, alongside the rest of the file actions rather than in the toolbar — the strip along the top is for the tools you reach for constantly, and exporting isn’t one of them. Export a board as PNG, SVG or a copy of the .excalidraw file, either into your vault or out to disk. Importing an .excalidraw file opens it as a new board rather than merging it into the one you’re looking at.

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’s off until you set up a service in Settings → AI & MCP.

That can be a cloud service with your own API key — or Ollama running on your own machine, in which case the page never leaves it. Ollama needs no key, just the address it’s listening on (blank means http://localhost:11434) and a model that can see images, like llava. A text-only model will answer about nothing.

A page also remembers how far you had zoomed in, per document, on that device — and changing the paper colour or template no longer throws that away.

How new Papers start

Settings ▸ Paper sets what a new Paper looks like: its paper colour, page size and template. Changing any of those inside a Paper changes that page and nothing else — it never quietly becomes your default.

There’s a quicker way round, and it’s usually the better one. Set a page up until it looks right, then press Make new Papers look like this in the toolbar, next to the paper colour. It keeps the colour, size and template — and the pen and ink colour with them. The button greys out once there’s nothing left to save, which is how you know it worked, and on a page you haven’t touched it tells you at a glance that this is already what you’ll get.

Your pen

The pen and ink colour follow you. Pick the highlighter in green and the next Paper opens with the highlighter in green — no re-picking on every file. You can set them in Settings ▸ Paper too, if you’d rather choose before you start writing.

The eraser is the exception: it’s never handed back, so putting a page down mid-erase can’t open the next one unable to draw.

Nib widths stay in the toolbar, under each pen — a thickness is something you judge by drawing with it. They apply from then on, and never change ink already on a page.

One difference worth knowing if you write on more than one device: nib widths follow you everywhere, because the same page should come out looking the same. The pen in your hand doesn’t — that’s a fact about where you’re sitting.

Names and getting back

A new document is named for the moment you made it — Whiteboard - 20260813.1432.07, and the same for Canvas - and Paper -. Never “Untitled”, which tells you nothing and collides with the last four you made. Rename it whenever you like.

Canvases, whiteboards and Paper pages all carry Back (⌘[) and Forward (⌘]) buttons in the tab strip, the same as notes do. Follow a card through to the note it holds, then come straight back to the board you were on.

Giving one properties

A canvas, whiteboard or Paper drawing can carry properties like a note can — a status, a stage, a client. Set them from the Table, where the file is a row like anything else, then filter and group on them.

They’re stored inside the drawing itself, so they travel with it when you copy, move or sync it.

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.