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Canvas MindMap adds keyboard-driven child and sibling nodes, directional auto-layout, and other tree-focused controls to Obsidian Canvas. It keeps the work inside Canvas rather than replacing it with a separate mind-mapping app: Canvas provides the visual workspace, while the community plugin adds actions for building and navigating a hierarchy.

What Canvas MindMap changes

Canvas is Obsidian’s visual workspace for arranging ideas, notes, and other material. Its cards can hold notes, images, PDFs, video, audio, and interactive web pages. The Canvas MindMap plugin, maintained in the Quorafind repository, describes its purpose as making Canvas work like a mind map. Its listed features include directional auto-layout, selecting a node’s tree, and changing node-edge colors. Obsidian’s Canvas overview explains the workspace; the plugin repository documents the added controls.

The distinction matters: Canvas supplies the cards and connections, and the plugin adds mind-map-oriented hierarchy actions and layout behavior. Obsidian says Canvas files are stored locally in the open JSON Canvas format, and that its API lets plugins add or modify cards and connections. That makes this approach useful if you want a visual map in your vault without giving up Canvas’s broader freeform workspace.

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How to make a basic mind map

  1. Install Canvas MindMap using one of the repository’s listed installation methods, then create a new Canvas.
  2. Create a card for your central idea and select it.
  3. Press Escape to leave text-editing mode. This step matters: the documented child-card shortcut expects the selected card to be out of edit mode.
  4. Press Tab to create a child card.
  5. Select the child card and press Enter to create a sibling. Continue adding child and sibling cards to build out the branches.

The repository describes this sequence as producing a mind map. It does not specify a universal layout result for every Canvas or plugin configuration, so treat the sequence as the documented starting workflow rather than a guarantee about how every map will be arranged.

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Keyboard controls and commands

Action Shortcut or command What to know
Create a child card Tab Exit edit mode first; then select the parent node.
Create a sibling card Enter The repository says this shortcut can be changed in settings.
Navigate between nodes Alt plus an arrow key Moves focus between nodes.
Create a floating node Cmd or Ctrl plus an arrow key Creates a node that is not added as a child in the tree workflow.
Create a child node Cmd or Ctrl plus Shift and an arrow key An alternate child-creation shortcut.

The plugin also lists commands for creating child, sibling, and floating nodes, opening the changelog, and entering or exiting edit mode. If a shortcut conflicts with your workflow or keyboard, use the command list or adjust the Enter binding in settings where available.

Install the plugin

The repository lists three routes: Obsidian’s community plugin market, BRAT, or manual installation from a release. For manual setup, download the release files and place main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css in the vault folder .obsidian/plugins/obsidian-canvas-mindmap. The repository documents the plugin name and folder path; check the current repository and Obsidian interface for up-to-date availability and release status before installing.

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  • Plugin market: Search the community plugins interface for Canvas MindMap and follow Obsidian’s installation flow.
  • BRAT: Add the repository identifier quorafind/canvas-mindmap through BRAT.
  • Manual: Put the three release files in the plugin folder shown above, then enable the plugin in Obsidian.

The available documentation does not establish a current release number or verified compatibility range. Check the plugin’s current listing and release notes, especially if you rely on mobile support or a specific Obsidian version.

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When this setup is a good fit

Canvas MindMap is a natural choice when you already use Obsidian Canvas and want a faster way to create a parent-child structure with the keyboard. Its advertised tree selection, directional auto-layout, and edge-color controls may help when arranging or emphasizing branches. Canvas itself remains more flexible than a strict mind-map canvas: it can mix hierarchical branches with other cards and media in the same visual space.

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There is no independent reliability or performance assessment established here, and the documented feature list should not be mistaken for a comparison against dedicated mind-mapping applications. The key trade-off is scope: this adds tree-oriented controls to Canvas, rather than establishing that Canvas MindMap has every specialized feature a dedicated mapping tool might offer.

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