Summon an Obsidian canvas over any window with a hotkey
ThinkBoard overlays your Obsidian vault's .canvas files on top of every app, so you can drag out cards, wire them together, and send the whole chain to AI without leaving your current window.
- LinkLoot access
- Free
- Provider costs
- Unknown
What you get from it
What it does
ThinkBoard is a desktop overlay that summons Obsidian canvases above whatever you're working in — triggered by a global hotkey or a four-finger swipe. Cards hold Markdown, links, and images, and everything saves straight back to the vault's native .canvas file.
Zooming out collapses groups of cards into named clusters; pinch back in and they expand again. Auto-layout tidies selections left-to-right or top-to-bottom, or each card places itself automatically if you enable it board-wide. Boards stay compatible with Obsidian: ThinkBoard edits in place, preserves fields it doesn't use, and merges changes card-by-card when both apps have the same board open.
The AI hook works on chains: select Ask AI on any card and it sends the entire upstream sequence as context — no separate chat needed. It stays off until you configure a provider, then runs locally via LM Studio or Ollama, or through a pasted key for OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Together AI, Fireworks AI, Mistral, or DeepSeek.
Who it helps
Obsidian users who think spatially but don't want to alt-tab into the editor mid-task. Researchers mapping arguments, writers outlining threads, or anyone sketching connections across notes benefits from summoning a board over a browser, terminal, or design tool and dismissing it with Esc.
Getting started
Install from the GitHub releases (macOS, Windows, Linux). Press Pause (default hotkey, configurable) to bring up the board. Double-click a card to edit; drag from a card's edge dot onto empty space to create a linked one. Cmd/Ctrl+O lists every board in your chosen vault with fuzzy search; without a vault set, it falls back to the standard file dialog. ⌘K opens a command palette covering all actions and settings. Ten built-in themes are available, or ThinkBoard picks up your vault's own Obsidian theme automatically.
Limits and costs
MIT-licensed and free to download. No hosted service exists, so there's nothing to pay for at ThinkBoard itself — but any cloud AI provider you connect requires its own account and pricing, which varies per vendor. The project is relatively new; check the repo's CI badge and issue tracker for current stability before relying on it for critical workflows.
Source links
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