Why 5 Million People Are OBSESSED With Excalidraw

5 million users added Excaliraw to their Obsidian vault. It's by far the most downloaded plug-in of all time, and it makes total sense. Da Vinci's notebooks weren't essays; they were diagrams. Einstein sketched his theories. Visual thinking is the key to your best ideas.

I wanted this for my notes, too. Years of paying for Notability or One Note were a waste. You see, each sketch was isolated. I couldn't draw connections, and they were all separate from my obsidian vault, my second brain. So, when I discovered Xcolyraw, it felt illegal. I could visualize literally anything. I [music] could add those sketches to my notes, and everything connects. It's all free, and I own it forever.

But I had one giant problem. The first time I used Excaliraw, I felt totally overwhelmed: too many tools and too many settings. Thousands of original ideas I could have had lost just like that. But after giving it a second shot, I finally got it.

My brainstorming went from staring at a [music] blank page to sketching ideas that build on each other. Confusing concepts finally made sense once I put them on the [music] canvas. This video will take you from someone who drastically underestimates their creativity to that one seen in "Iron [music] Man" kind of thinking. It won't matter if you're a beginner or expert; we will upgrade your thinking.

So, here's the Excaliraw canvas: infinite space. You will love this view, this freedom, very [music] soon.

But hold up. How did we even get here? You're probably missing the Excalor [music] plugin. Maybe you don't even have Obsidian installed. So, let's actually do that first. But no, you can skip the steps that you have already done. Just use the video chapters.

So, first you're going to install Obsidian on the official Obsidian homepage, typing obsidian.md and clicking on getting Obsidian for your OS and opening the file that you've downloaded. [music]

Then, upon first opening Obsidian, you will get this view, and you will just like click create under create new vault and give it a name. For example, Xcaliraw demo. And then pick a location. I'm just going to make a new folder for it: Xcaliraw vault demo, and I'm going to choose it because an Obsidian vault is literally just a folder of text files. So, click create.

So now, within a blank Obsidian vault, but also in any vault that you have, you click on the gear icon on the bottom left, and then on the left menu, go to community plugins. And here, if you never installed community plugins before, you have to click turn on community plugins so that you can browse the kind of plugins that the community of Obsidian has built to extend [music] the capability of the software.

And you don't even have to search long to find Excaliraw, the most popular plug-in of all time. Then, click on install and enable. And we get a nice welcome message that we can click away. But already, shout out to Z for making such an amazing plugin!

Now, you can close this menu. And with the new button in the ribbon menu, click on new drawing. And bam! I'm going to close the graph view here, and also I'm going to collapse the sidebar. And here we have our canvas.

Okay. So, wait a minute, guys. A giant trap a lot of users walk into is to just skip the basics of obsidian itself. If we immediately dive into Excaliraw, we risk missing 90% of its potential. So, what I'm going to recap now is crucial so that XC draw is not just another drawing [music] tool, but a visual extension of your mind.

So, let's close our drawing like a browser window first [music] and get our sidebar back because this is Obsidian. And here we have our file explorer where we can create new notes by clicking this button. We can give them a title, and in it, [music] we write text, specifically markdown.

So, markdown can be formatted in specific ways. We can make text bold. We can make bullet lists. But that's not the important part. I'm going to rename my welcome note to [music] giraffe. And I'm going to name my just newly created note awesome adventure.

And now, when I write on my awesome adventure, "I've seen a." And now we can just write giraffe. But also, we can use two opening square brackets and two closing square brackets. Obsidian immediately autocomp completes this for us. And now we can create a link. So here, [music] I can type in giraffe, it has autocomplete, and now we have a link between our notes. Because when I controllclick on giraffe, we're actually going to open giraffe. And also, if, like in my left ribbon menu, I go into graph view, we can see that we have connected awesome adventure with giraffe.

Now, let me actually add a note on giraffes. I've added two lines here. And now, going back to our awesome adventure, [music] we can't just link to giraffe; we can also embed giraffe. What does that mean?

So again, we create a link with two opening square brackets and link to giraffe. But now I put an exclamation mark in front of giraffe. And now we have the content from giraffe within our other note. So, we can link to another note, and we can display its content from this link.

And I mean, obviously, if I go into giraffe now and put awesome adventure to the side, and now I add something else to giraffes, "I've seen two [music] to browse so far." Like, if we add something, it will immediately update in our embedded link. So yeah, that was the essential thing I wanted you to remember.

Having remembered links and embedding, let's start using Xcolor Draw. We will go over the basics in a perfect, non-overwhelming order. And also, I will warn you about something that will cost you hours down the line, and how to fix it, of course.

So, recap: we created our first drawing by clicking the new drawing button on the left, which also like this drawing. Okay, now we have two because we already made one. I'm going to delete the older drawing.

But, you know, for creating a drawing, there's actually a much faster way. You can open the so-called command pallet by clicking here on the ribbon menu. But, if you're even cooler, you're going to use control P on Windows or command P on Mac. And this immediately opens the command pallet. [music]

And now, if I type in Xcaliraw, and as you can see, we have a lot of things at our disposal. But what we care about right now is, theoretically, if we also type in create, we could also create a new drawing, also, for example, in an adjacent window. But let's close one for now and delete one again. You know, that will save us some time down the line, but that's not even the thing I wanted to point out. Note how creating this drawing creates a new drawing like in the Xcaliraw folder, and I will show you how to change that later.

Okay, guys, now it's time to learn visual thinking. I first have like close the side pane, and we're looking at our drawing. And welcome to your infinite canvas!

The first thing I want you to learn is how to sketch something [music] simple and move around freely. Most elements here are pretty obvious to use. And by the way, don't worry about this view; it will literally disappear if you just intend to draw something.

Okay, so let's create a rectangle. So for that, I have create like selected the rectangle tool. And now, here we go, we have our rectangle. We can just drag them and like select between them. We can also scale them with each corner like individually or rotate them by using this extra handle.

Now, if we click outside of it, we can't really move around. That is because we can use the hand tool on the right to move around. So, here we can, you know, move, or you can scroll up and down with the scroll wheel, and you can hold either control or command to either scroll inward where your cursor is pointing or to scroll away.

Okay, now let's use the diamond tool. Okay, wait, guys, you see what I did there? This is a huge mistake, guys! Do not click any of these icons by hand, I beg you!

And as Cali draw, your cursor is your pencil, the pencil to draw your mind. Like if you constantly hop over to the icons, they will cost you hours down the line. So, immediately start learning shortcuts. And I mean, you can immediately see them here. So, you have one for the selection tool that we already sort of looked at, or two for the rectangle tool. Or you can also click certain letters that make sense. For example, for the hand, you can click H for hand and immediately move around.

And also, if you hover over any icon, [music] it reveals a secondary and again like intuitive letter for each of these tools. So, rectangle [music] can also be R, which I can use. And also, by the way, to also use the hand, you can click on your scroll wheel if your mouse supports that.

Then there's the diamond tool. You know the drill. Also, I'm not using my mouse; I'm clicking three or D for diamond. [music] And with this, I can drag diamonds into my canvas.

Circle tool. Uh, sorry, guys. [music] Ellipse tool, of course. And no, it doesn't use E; it uses O because O apparently looks like a circle. I mean, I I get it. Of course, you can also scale everything again. And like, of course, you can rotate a circle, but why would you rotate a circle? Never mind.

Also on like Windows you can control on uh Mac command plus Z your actions actually to like reverse things or like combined with shift you can go forward in time again. Also with your selection tool that by the way also uses the letter V to be selected, you [music] can select multiple elements at the same time and transform them at the same time. You [music] can also command C commandV any objects to duplicate them. I'm going to delete [music] them with the backspace key.

And the more superior way to copy is to on Windows hold alt and on Mac hold option and then drag your element, and bam, you have [music] copies of it if you just hold. Yeah. Okay. Control Z. Control Z. Uh command Z I meant. Okay.

Yeah, we can create arrows by hitting five or A. And now, if you click anywhere, you create an anchoring point for the path of the arrow. So, if I click again, we actually make another point. This arrow should go through and like a few more points. Click. Click.

And if we want the arrow to stop, [music] we need to click again on our last point that anchors it. So, I'm going to go back to my last point. And we see that it sort of, you know, snaps back to it. And if I click again, this finalizes our arrow. And now, you can't just adjust and transform it like the other elements, but you can also adjust the path that you made with it.

Now, all shapes that you've created so far support that if you click them and then doubleclick them that actually you will add a sticky note. Sticky notes are just text that stays inside the shape. So, you see it's like inside my shape. You can achieve the same thing by selecting your shape and then hitting enter. Beautiful.

By the way, again, I set every element that we covered so far. So, also arrows. If I hit enter on it, a relation. Bam! We have an arrow with a relation. [music]

Now by hitting six or L, you can also select the line tool which sort of behaves like the arrow tool. And you can also end it by clicking on your last point. But if you hit enter here, you will actually enter a mode where you can add more points to the line. Oh, damn, I just created a big arrow!

Now if you hit seven or P, you will select the drawing tool which has a bit of this like dynamic scaling of the brush stroke. Each stroke that you make is its own element that you can transform individually. And of course, this enables hand like handwriting, but of course I find it pretty hard with my like mouse. Like if you use obsidian and then x color draw on your iPad for example, this would work much smoother.

Now hitting 8 or T lets us select the text tool which if we just click anywhere on the canvas, we can write some text. And the text also supports all the operations that all the other elements allow.

And if we hit zero or E, we can actually choose the eraser tool. And that is just basically a touch of death that just removes any objects that we've made. And like it only removes entire objects.

Lastly, a little pro tip: [music] when you create arrows, they will actually sort of stick to elements as you can see here with this circle. And you know you can do it from nothing or also like connect one element with another element and you know then the arrow will actually stick to these elements. Very handy for mind maps. Yeah.

And I want you to know that all of these things are vector graphics if that wasn't obvious. So that means no matter how far you zoom in, they won't really be pixelated. Always sharp, always amazing.

Now that is only the shaping and transforming part of Excali raw. To really align your visual thinking with your actual thinking, you have to learn about styling.

By the way, if this has been hard on your eyes so far, you can hit shift alt D or shift option D and then you will switch to dark [music] mode. It will run into issues with certain elements. So, I will show you a better way later. But for now, you can switch if you want to. I'm going to switch back though.

Okay. As you can see, I have prepared a new scene. And the cool thing is you already know how to make this. But now, let's make it even better.

If I select my giraffe element, you actually see this painting palette icon on the bottom left. And if I hover over it, it says edit. So, if I click on it. Ooh, interesting.

So, here we can actually adjust lots of different things. For example, the color of our stroke, if the background should be filled. For example, here yellow might fit. You can also change the filling style to sort of fit this scribbly sketching aesthetic. You can also change the stroke style, and you can also adjust the sloppiness. So for example, okay, maybe this for the giraffe would be would be the best. But for example, sloppiness might make sense for an arrow. So if I click on the arrow, we can change the sloppiness. And as you can see, the high sloppiness level makes it even messier. Or, you know, it can be really, really clean.

You can also adjust the font and also make the edges more edgy. And you can also, let's go to nature, actually make the background green. And I want the font to be bigger. And now we can actually align the text on the left or on the right and on the bottom or at the top. [music] Let's center it again. And also adjust the opacity, so the visibility of the object. I'm also going to make the giraffe font bigger. [clears throat]

Also something for arrows I forgotten is that you can also adjust the different arrow heads. For example, we can just remove it. And in the same way adjust the arrow tail. So with this we could also flip an arrow.

Now, another pro tip: If you rightclick the canvas, you can also click on toggle grid, which as you can see gives you a grid to orient your elements in to make sure everything is a bit more aligned. Or you right click on the canvas again and instead choose snap to objects. Which means that if I create a new object, you can see on my cursor there are these reference lines because snap to objects lets you create objects in relation to other objects which can also result in more symmetrical sketches. And again these are modes you activate or deactivate. So I'm going to deactivate snap to objects.

Now, also a general tip that like even before you create images, you can predefine their styling. For example, if you only want to create super super sloppy drawn elements, you just choose the like strongest sloppiness. And maybe also you want all of them to be red and then all the elements you create sort of have this specific style.

There will be some elements that we want to reuse across our thinking sometimes [music] or in general. Wouldn't it be nice to have some sort of like icons that we can always use? Of course, there is a way.

So, I've actually created this leaf object out of multiple elements. So, you can group multiple elements by sort of, you know, making anything and then selecting all of them and then right clicking them and then clicking on group selection. And you know, that's how I created this leaf.

And now, if I want to use this leaf in other drawings, I can just rightclick it again and click on add to library. So, where did our leaf actually go to? If we go to the side pane, we can actually see this icon right here, which stands for library. So, let's extend this. And oh, there it is in our personal library. And we can literally just drag it into our drawing, out of this library, and use it as much as we want also in other drawings.

But what I also want to direct your attention to is the browse libraries button. So, if we click on there, you actually see numerous Excalibraw libraries, for example, software architecture. But the add to Excaliraw button will not work. You have to click on download. [music]

Then you will get this file, and then you go back to Excaliraw. Click on the three dots, and then [music] click on open. And here downloads you will find this library. You will open it, and oh, now I got these cool server architecture icons that I could theoretically use! So, let's actually drag this in here. Now I make this. I'm going to group it with command or controlG. [music]

Now, all of what we just learned still wasn't revolutionary because all this drawing has still just been drawing. Well, what I'm going to show you now is one of the main reasons why Scaly Draw is loved by millions: because you can actually embed your drawings.

So, let's actually get our sidebar back. And now, let's go back to our giraffe note. Now, if we create a new link here with two opening square brackets, we actually see our drawing as one of the options. So I'm going to choose it. And now I'm going to put an exclamation mark in front of it. And there we go! Our drawing is inside of our note. So again, why is this useful?

Okay, first I want to I want you to know that you can also skip this [music] by just using the command palette. So command P, and then here, if you search for embed, and then you will see Excaliraw embed the most recently edited drawing. I'm [music] going to click that, and bam! That also immediately puts it in our note, doing that what we just did by hand for us. [music]

And yeah, this is immensely useful because it connects what we draw, like what we sketch, to what we write. And also any links to this note that has this drawing in it will also, if we embed them, include this visual information.

And like another example, let's say we're collecting ideas, ideas for a new zoo. [music] And now we can use the command pallet and type in create embed. So we will actually create a new drawing, let's say in an adjacent window, so in a second window, and embed it into the active document. So I'm going to click this. [music]

So this one creates a drawing, and two, puts it in our note. And now I have my visual drawing here. And now I've done something visual. Did some visual brainstorming. And I come back to my note, and you see it's immediately in there. [music]

And like you can do a word cloud, you can also just do like a flowchart software architecture if you're a programmer. I mean the possibilities are endless! And, you know, if you want to share this with a client or just make it like look more professional, you can always multi select all the elements. Let me actually do this like make this bigger. And then here you can make the arrows like more uh blocky and uh decrease the sloppiness. And now I have this like really fancy diagram in such a short time. [music]

And like again if I go back to my note notice how it's immediately updated like this is directly linked. This is this is connected. Like also if I make a new element somewhere very far away and go back to my note. You see the framing is dynamic. [music] So again this is 100 times better than just a screenshot from like another software that we like put in our notes.

Also a little pro tip: So again, because we embedded this in here, this is an exclamation mark and a link. But also, if we go inside of the link, we can add a pipe character and then for example at [music] 800. And this will adjust the sizing of our embed. So this actually makes it bigger.

But you know guys, embedding is not the only magical feature interconnecting your drawings and your vault because links within our drawing take this to a whole new level! So, what do I mean exactly? Let's say we have a plain text node. Okay.

So now here I took some notes as like a bullet point list. And now if I go back to my old drawing and I actually want our like visual thing here to also sort of be a map toward our knowledge that is related. I can just drag my note about the internet [music] in here on the canvas. And now with the selection tool I can like drag it around. And well, we have our link as a visual element.

You can also notice this like prefix, just like a little pin. And it maybe has some square brackets for you like a normal link in Obsidian. If you want to change that, I will also show you how to do that later. But this is a link if we just regular click it, but holding [music] like command on Mac or control on Windows and we will actually go inside of it. Or just hovering over it and holding command or control will actually expose its content.

But now I'm going to share a pro tip because you don't even need to drag something into the canvas to create a link. You can just add a link to an element that you already have on your canvas. So if I select giraffe and then rightclick it and then at the bottom click add link, I can then [music] type in two opening square brackets to then search for giraffe. And there it is! So I'm going to click enter and the giraffe link is added. [music]

So now there's also this tiny blue icon on the top right and I can also hover and then hold control and we get the content for giraffe and also this is kind of inception because you know uh but but never mind like this is really cool!

But, you know, apart of adding a link to an element there is an even cooler way to add links which is to go on our element [music] and then copy a link to this element. So we can copy here, copy link for the selected elements and we can give it an alias but we won't do that right now and click on link. [music] And now we have copied it to our clipboard.

So now I can go into the giraffe node and I can then paste this link and you know this link now if I click on it will immediately let me jump to our giraffe element. So if you have like a giant drawing you can immediately make links that send you to a specific part of your visual thinking.

And also I've added something to this other drawing. If we want to link to a specific part of a drawing, so like because if we now have, you know, [music] embedded this drawing, we will have all of it. But if for example, we only want to actually embed the top right. We go to our drawing, we select all of our elements, we group all of them, and then we copy a link for the selected elements, but we choose the group button. That is really important.

And now if we go back to our ideas for a new zoo brainstorming, I've added this header but also for theme parks. And then I can actually paste this link and it also has the embedding exclamation mark in front of it. And bam, we have the specific part! And also if we click on it, we immediately jump in this part of our drawing. Again, really useful if your visual thinking gets very big and you want to reference specific non-s singular parts.

I think you're starting to see why Excaliraw linking with your Obsidian vault is so incredibly powerful!

But we forgot about an essential part of visual thinking so far: How do we add images? So, the first and most obvious way might be this image icon on the top right. If we click it, we can import from our system, which means from our file explorer. I got it in my downloads a picture of an axelottle. And bam, we have our image, which I can now drag around and add to my axelottles.

Or maybe you already have the image in your vault. So here in the sidebar, I already have duck because I just dragged it into Obsidian. But dragging it in here won't actually show an image because it's as if we dragged a note in here. It will just create a literal link to the file. But you know, I mean, this is also a link, but a [music] link as an image or sort of a reference of the image.

So to actually get that to work, we need to use one of the most important buttons. So keep this one in mind, it's insert any file here on the right. And if we click insert any file and then choose duck.jpeg, then we actually get the option as image. And bam, we have our duck image!

But you know what I just meant with like references to something? For example, if we go into our giraffe node and want to say, "this is a friend of duck," and then add a add like the image of the duck. We can also add the duck.jpeg and put an exclamation mark in front. And now we have an image of the duck here. But just this is again just a link to the image. So we can open it with a control-click. And in our drawing, this is also just a link to the image which we can open with a control-click, you know.

And now if we create a new folder [music] and call it images to just be more tidy and we open it again, it will still be opened but in our images directory. And like an even better way to show you this is that if I now rename duck to duck Jeff. And now Obsidian will ask me if it has to like update all the references which well yeah obviously it should it should actually always do that. So we're going to activate that and the duck will still work. But if we now look in our giraffe where we said, "this is a friend of duck," and look at the link. The link is not just the link of duck.jpeg but of duck Jeff, you know, like like this is just really important that like things use references.

We can also add GIFs, by the way. So, animated images. For that, I'm first going to go to my downloads, take the GIF, drag it into my vault like this. Now, I have forest inspiration.gif. And now inside my drawing, I'm going to use insert any file again and use my forest inspiration.gif GIF and not as an image because as an image it will just be static but instead you're going to use it as [music] an embedible.

And you know now it has weird borders. You can just remove them by going here and you know in stroke color just choosing the no color. And now we can actually add our zoo inspiration and have something animated here.

And you know images are cool but there are so many cooler things you can add. For example, PDFs, web pages, or direct markdown notes from within your note. You can draw all sources of knowledge. And I'm going to show you how.

So, I actually got my PDF here, and I'm going to put it in my vault. And now the move for PDFs is again to use the insert any file from vault. So, we can now choose ducks at distance PDF. And now we have two options. For example, PDF as image. Now, we would have a lot of options. For example, import the first three pages as images, [music] which okay, yeah, it kind of works.

Let me actually reverse that because what I think is cooler here is to choose our PDF and add it as an embedible. So now when actually clicking this, we have our duck essay beside our ducks and from which we could pull our information. But obviously if you import it as images you can annotate things on the PDF. That is something you can't do when it is like embeddible.

We can also add web pages. So we just [music] take the web page like exactly the link and then if we hold it in our canvas it tells us, "try shift option or control to try different like drag and drop actions," because right now it wants to turn it into a YouTube thumbnail with URL which won't work. But instead we're going to hold on Windows it's alt on Mac it's option and now it says insert interactive frame. So if we do that, bam! We actually have our website here through which we can scroll and sort of we have our 10 amazing facts that we can also draw from with our duck here.

But also the same way. So let's go back to our other drawing. [music] We can add markdown files from within our vault. So again, insert any file from vault and now we're going to take our notes from the internet MD. Markdown and then not as an image because again that will be static but as an embedible and wo we got our markdown notes.

So also if we add something about "the internet is awesome." And then we go back to our drawing. You see that this is also added to this interactable markdown node and through which we can also add things within our drawing. And also if we click outside of it, it sort of changes from like an edit mode to this display mode which is stylable. So right now it actually has a fill that doesn't really make any sense to me. So I'm going to remove the background and actually make the stroke a bit [music] bigger. And that's pretty pretty awesome.

Now I want to show you another really strong feature that will give you an insane bit of understanding about Excaliraw which will help you a lot down the line because right now I mean what are we actually doing? So we have these different browser tabs here on obsidian which usually is our text notes and if we click on a drawing we have a drawing but what actually is this drawing?

So let's actually treat this drawing for once like imagine it is like imagine it is literally a physical canvas, a physical canvas that we now drew on. Like I drew on this canvas. Wouldn't it be cool if we can draw on the front and then just turn it around and take our notes on the back? And this is exactly what back of the note cards are.

This visual thinking we did here, this is visual brainstorming for a new zoo. But this drawing right here is kind of its own thing, right? Its own visual thinking, which is totally fine, but maybe we actually have some insights about this that we don't want to capture somewhere else, but right here on the back of this drawing.

So, we're [music] just going to right click on the canvas and then we're going to click add back of note card. And [music] now we need to name our section. So, for example, maybe I have some philosophy insight. So, I'm going to just name this action philosophy.

And now this thing appears. I'm going to click outside of it to actually be able to move it around. And, you know, I'm going to, you know, put it a bit further to the side. And, you know, now I'm clicking inside of it to actually add some thoughts. So, for example, "nature and and giraffes are [music] interconnected." So, this is a note that I took on nature and giraffes in this drawing. But you know where does this actually also this writing where does this go to?

And now here comes the giant [music] kicker! If we go on the three dots on the top right we see the more options, right? Like we can do a lot of things with any note. Like this is just with any other note like we can just click on the three dots and like delete the file for example.

But if we go back to the drawing, so an Excaliraw drawing is actually also just a markdown note. >> [music] >> If we click on the three dots on the top right, I can click on open as markdown. And what you will see is that what [music] where's our drawing? And you know for that exact scenario if you by accident open this, this tells you, "oh god switch to extra x color draw view in more [music] options." So we can just open our drawings now like these are our drawings and they're just this, right? [music]

And if we want to go back we can click on the three dots and click on open saw drawing. So again we switch back like these are two dimensions but now remember that we took our back of note notes here. So if we switch to the markdown view like our other drawing won't have anything because by the way we can just [music] theoretically delete this warning and that wouldn't do anything like here is all the data of Excaliraw but now in our drawing where we took the back of note notes you see here that there is markdown here is our philosophy section and I could theoretically write more philosophy like like animals have intrinsic value like I wrote this in a plain markdown note [music] but now if Go back to our drawing. Oh, damn! It actually appeared because again, we're taking notes on the back of our drawing.

But guys, from the basics, I've saved the best thing to mention last. I'm going to show you Excaliraw's most powerful feature.

Okay, guys, watch this! So, I've gone back to my ideas for a new zoo. And maybe I also want to add all my thoughts that I have about giraffes to this because a zoo obviously needs some giraffes. And I already have some visual thinking on giraffes. And that is also connected with nature. Like it's all it could fit well into this visual thinking.

So just click on insert any file and then you know we're just going to find our other Xcolor drawing and then we're [music] going to import it as an image. And do you see this? I mean yeah our like embedible things on the sides like our extra info is not really rendering. Let me just connect that real quick. So, I've connected these, but but but you see what this means! I can even go back into my other drawing. And now here, like I don't know, add the text note. "It's the coolest animal" just like as a little extra. [music]

And now, if we go back to our big drawing where we added this drawing, this gets added as well! Like again, in the end, you just get this big picture view and you can break down big ideas into smaller components. It's absolutely amazing!

And you know now we're actually understand some important settings about Excaliraw by opening the Obsidian settings. And I will also show you a thing that can make Excaliraw 10x more capable.

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Okay, so let's dive into the settings. So again, go to the bottom left, then click on the gear icon, and you will find like on the left menu under community plugins that you've installed. Click on Excaliraw. And here you have [music] way too many things.

But a thing that immediately interests you under basic is [music] just Xcaliraw folder which is case-sensitive. So here you can see that Xcaliraw is like the selected folder. But you could also rename this to drawings for example. And now if I create a new folder called drawings and now create a new drawing it will spawn in my drawings folder. Okay. But I'm going to reverse that.

Also note that you can search for any settings which is very practical. So let's actually search for like opening square like like brackets. Oh yeah, for example, show brackets around links. This is something we could enable. And now if we look into our drawing where we had like our manual lonely link of uh like our internet note, it now has these used to square brackets around it. But yeah, getting deep into these settings can take a while, but in a way, you don't really need to worry about them too much.

Okay, to get Excaliraw on steroids, here's what I haven't shown you so far. You see that Obsidian icon on the right? That is the Obsidian tools panel for Excaliraw. And here you have numerous utility tools, for example, for adding math equations. But the most powerful button of them all is actually this one: it's to install or update Excalor scripts.

So, Excaliraw is already an extension for Obsidian. But what if I told you that Excaliraw itself also has extensions, lots of them? And like here, for example, we're going to grab like we have a search bar on the top again. And this is basically just a giant node. We're going to search for the slideshow. Click on there. And there it is, the slideshow. And click on install the script.

And also, we're going to search for invert colors. That is something I have actually uh like teased because invert colors is like if you click on install the script [music] is basically the better dark mode for Excaliraw if you are a dieh hard [music] dark mode user.

Now that's all we need for now. And now again clicking the obsidian icon at the bottom we have our downloaded tools which we can also pin to the right by right-clicking them. And now for example if we enable the dark mode here like that I shown you here uh then you will see that the im that the drawing inside the drawing that we've added actually doesn't work or like is hard to recognize. So if I now turn off and go back to light mode and use invert colors. Now you see that this is actually properly dark modeed with the presentation script.

I'm teasing the last major thing that I want to show you guys, which is: now that we can think so freely and connect everything, we might also want to share this in some way like maybe for our blogs, our clients, social media, whatever.

So, we can go to the bottom left of our tray menu and we can actually click on export image. Like this lets us export this as an image or as a PDF or just do a dynamic screenshot with like a lot of different settings. >> [music] >>

So let's actually turn this into a presentation. We can just take the arrow tool. We can first go over the ducks, then over the axelottles, and then end with our theme park. You know, if we select this arrow and click on the presentation script, bam! We actually can jump to these things as like slides and like go from element to element, which [music] is I know it might be kind of janky, but it's like a super effective, loweffort way to just bit by bit reveal your thought process visually.

And yeah, now I have to give massive credit to Zult. He's been building this entire plug-in for more than 4 years. If you want to dive into even more advanced features of Excaliraw, check out one of his numerous tutorials.

And yeah, if you want the vault that I've used for the demonstration, you can download it with the link below or like right here because yeah, maybe you want to play around with the things we created in this tutorial. And yeah, just apply your [music] knowledge more. But that's it. See you soon.