canvas

A skill for creating and editing Obsidian Canvas boards, which are visual documents made from connected notes, files, links, groups, and text. It stores boards as standard JSON Canvas files inside a user's vault.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to list or create canvases, arrange notes and media spatially, add links and groups, or update a vault's canvas catalog.
Why use it?
It provides a controlled way to make visual maps of notes without writing outside the selected vault or bypassing the project's transaction process.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/agricidaniel/claude-obsidian/canvas
Any agent
npx skills add AgriciDaniel/claude-obsidian --skill canvas
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AgriciDaniel/claude-obsidian

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,280 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00072 $0.01280
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00640
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00256
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00128

Measured yesterday against content hash cc2eea755757, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

canvas scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/canvas/SKILL.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Canvas

Treat a canvas as a vault-scoped JSON Canvas document. Keep reads read-only and route every requested mutation through one recoverable transaction.

Resolve the installed product root from this skill's own location, not from the vault or current working directory:

PRODUCT_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/installed/claude-obsidian
CORE="$PRODUCT_ROOT/scripts/claude-obsidian.py"
test -f "$CORE"

Choose the syntax source

Prefer a separately installed kepano/obsidian-skills json-canvas skill for format details. Otherwise read references/canvas-spec.md. The open standard is JSON Canvas 1.0.

Use this skill for vault workflow and transaction safety even when an upstream syntax skill is available.

Scope

  • Resolve the user vault before reading. Never derive it from plugin files.
  • Store boards under wiki/canvases/; use wiki/canvases/main.canvas only as the default when the user did not name a board.
  • Treat wiki/canvases/index.md as an optional catalog. Update it only when a canvas is created, renamed, or removed.
  • Use vault-relative paths in file and background; reject absolute paths, .. traversal, home shortcuts, and paths that escape through symlinks.
  • Reference only files already inside the vault. If an optional capture or media capability is detected, compose with it and consume its returned vault-relative path. Do not assume a particular plugin, command, or session log, and do not download or copy assets in this skill.
  • Use link nodes for URLs. Accept HTTPS URLs only; a link node does not grant permission to fetch the page. Creating its JSON makes no request, but opening it in Obsidian may fetch Open Graph metadata from that URL's host. Disclose that render-time egress and confirm it is acceptable; otherwise use a text node containing the URL.

Read-only operations

For status or list requests, parse the selected .canvas files and report node counts, group labels, broken edge endpoints, and missing vault-relative file targets. If the default canvas is absent, report that fact and offer a creation preview; do not create it during a status request.

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 130 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A cc2eea755757

Subscribe to this mod's changes

canvas is a skill published in the GitHub repository AgriciDaniel/claude-obsidian (14,464 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 1,280 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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