"Obsidian" Canvas on STEROIDS: Excalidraw 1.9.5 release

Excalidraw 1.9.5 for Obsidian adds “frames” and a new way to embed almost any file from your Vault as live, interactive iframes—turning Obsidian notes into canvases that can host PDFs, markdown, Kanban boards, videos, tweets, web pages, and even shared ChatGPT conversations. The practical payoff is straightforward: instead of pasting static screenshots, users can drop in content that stays interactive inside the Excalidraw canvas, resize it, and in many cases scroll or edit it in place.

The release starts with frames, a tool that lets users group multiple elements so they can move them together and adjust frame-level properties like opacity. Frames can also be managed quickly: elements can be moved into or out of a frame, and right-click options allow selecting all elements within a frame, removing them, or deleting the frame entirely.

The bigger shift comes with “Insert any file from The Vault.” A new button and a matching command-palette action make it possible to pick a Vault document, choose a section, and import it as an iframe. For PDFs and markdown, the iframe can be scrolled; for markdown, the content can be edited when inserted normally. The workflow also supports resizing and rotation. Rotation has a tradeoff: rotated iframes can be readable but not editable until rotated back (using Shift while rotating).

Embedding isn’t limited to Vault files. Drag-and-drop works too, with platform-specific modifier keys to force iframe insertion. On Windows, holding Ctrl+Shift while dropping inserts as an iframe; on macOS, the equivalent is the Control key plus Shift. The same modifier logic applies when dropping links from the internet.

Once embedded, the content’s behavior depends on type. A Kanban board imported as an iframe remains fully functional: cards can be moved around directly inside Obsidian. Videos imported as iframes can play in the background; clicking toggles the “active” state (indicated by a thick border), enabling resizing and transformations while active. Tweets can be pasted as links and become interactive embeds. Web pages can be embedded on desktop, with the caveat that mobile support is limited.

Theme handling is another key detail. The iframe background and styling follow the Excalidraw theme (including light/dark mode). Users can override this in plugin settings so iframes match Obsidian’s theme instead, or force a specific mode per file via markdown front matter using an iframe color mode key with values like dark, light, auto, and default.

The release also introduces “web embed” frames, enabling embedding of identity-requiring services via shared links—most notably shared ChatGPT chats. Pasting a ChatGPT conversation link into a web embed frame allows continuing the conversation inside the canvas, with the chat preserved in the embedded context. There’s also a deliberate limitation: embedding an Excalidraw drawing inside Obsidian as an iframe is not fully supported yet, and some embedded content may degrade to placeholders when the entire canvas is embedded into another document. The author frames this as a minimum viable product: usable and stable, but with rough edges, including known issues like iframe scrolling/editing behavior that are expected to be fixed. The release invites bug reports on GitHub and iteration based on user feedback.