Canvas Overview

Overview of Canvas Features

High level overview of the changes Caret makes to the Obsidian Canvas and how to use them.

New Menu Icons

Three new icons have been added to the Obsidian canvas menu. They enable you to interact with the majority of Caret canvas functionality.

1. Create User Message
   • Adds a new spot for a user message to go.
2. Sparkle
   • Runs a conversation with the LLM.
3. Wand
   • Currently used to change the role type of a given note to either user, assistant, or system for the LLM and client.
   • Additional functionality will be added here over time.

Conversation Management

• Starting a Conversation:
  1. Select any note on the canvas.
  2. Click the Sparkle icon.
  3. The LLM responds based on the given prompt.
• Continuing a Conversation:
  1. Click the Create User Message icon to create a user message that will use any nodes connected to that user message as context in the conversation.
  2. You can also just run the Sparkle icon on a message or on a piece of text, and it will automatically be treated as a user message and generate the assistant message.
  3. To continue a conversation from any assistant messages, you can just click the Add User Message node and then continue from there.
• Branching Conversations:
  1. Click Sparkle when on any branch.
  2. The conversation continues from the path with the most ancestors (longest conversation).
  3. Only the context from the longest lineage will be included.
• Remixing Conversations:
  1. Disconnect the nodes you want to remix.
  2. Reconnect them in the new desired order.

Canvas Prompt Command

This command allows you to run prompts on the canvas in a slightly different fashion. You can select multiple notes and use them as context for a single prompt. This will output a new note on the canvas.

• Selecting Notes:
  1. Select multiple notes on the canvas.
  2. Run a prompt command on the selected notes.
  3. All selected notes are used as input.
  4. The output is a single node containing the response.
• Including Block References:
  • Include block references as in Obsidian.
  • Block references will be automatically pulled in as context.
• Adding PDFs:
  1. Add PDFs to the canvas.
  2. PDFs are used as context in responses.
  3. Support for images and other content will be added at a later time. needs more explanation