Start using the flipside of your markdown notes: Powerful new Excalidraw-Obsidian features - v2.0.26

Excalidraw-Obsidian v2.0.26 adds a “flip the page” workflow that lets any existing Markdown note behave like an Excalidraw drawing—while still preserving full Markdown searchability and editing. The core idea is simple but consequential: Excalidraw drawings saved in Obsidian can now be stored as Markdown, and users can toggle between a drawing view and a Markdown view on demand. That removes the old tradeoff between visual thinking and text-first PKM, turning each note into a two-sided artifact: a visual summary on one side and detailed links and notes on the other.

A new command converts existing Markdown notes into Excalidraw drawings. Users open a Markdown file, open Obsidian’s command palette (Ctrl/Cmd+P), and run “Convert markdown note to Excalidraw drawing.” After conversion, “Toggle between Excalidraw and markdown mode” switches the same note between views. For people who want the option everywhere, the plugin can also mass-convert notes, though the guidance is to do it gradually because the minimum Excalidraw markup is lightweight but the change still affects how files are managed.

The release also targets publishing and default behavior. If Excalidraw files should open as Markdown instead of drawings, the plugin introduces an “Excalidraw open MD” frontmatter property. For published pages, an Easter-egg-style hiding mechanism uses a double percent “%%” marker above text elements so the plugin can strip those markers on save and hide the Excalidraw markup on the web. There’s also a “force save” option (Ctrl+S) to ensure the drawing is written in the intended mode.

Under the hood, v2.0.26 introduces a minor file format change that improves manual readability and editing: a new “element links” section. That comes with a compatibility warning—files saved with v2.26 won’t fully work with earlier versions—so updating Excalidraw-Obsidian across devices is recommended.

Beyond flipping notes, the update upgrades embedded content. Markdown embeds can now reference sections from the back side of a drawing, enabling card-like layouts where the front and back each contribute headings and content. Users can add a “back of note card” via the context menu or command palette, then create Markdown embeds that reference those back-side sections; when switching to Markdown view, the new heading appears in the document. Similar functionality exists for “insert any file,” letting a Markdown section be pulled from another Excalidraw file.

Quality-of-life improvements include smoother editing (pressing Enter jumps into editing when an embeddable element is selected) and bug fixes for embedded element style settings. The release also adds image annotation: “Annotate image in Excalidraw” embeds an annotated Excalidraw version back into the original image location, with settings modeled after cropping.

Finally, users can reference frames by name—useful for authoring companion Markdown for slide-like presentations—and can use multiple Excalidraw templates by pointing the plugin to a templates folder. The result is a more flexible PKM system where visual cards, structured text, and publish-ready output can coexist without forcing a single mode.