Sketch flowcharts and mind maps without leaving your notes

Some ideas aren't sentences. A system architecture, a decision tree, a quick sketch of how three pieces of a project connect — text can describe them, but a diagram shows them instantly. The usual cost of drawing one is a context switch: open Excalidraw, open Miro, find the right board, come back, paste a screenshot. inkwell skips that entirely by putting a full drawing canvas next to the editor.

One shortcut away from a blank canvas

Click the Draw icon in the sidebar and a canvas opens alongside your vault — shared across every note, not tied to a single document. It saves automatically to .inkwell/canvas.json, so there's no export step and nothing to remember to save before you close the app.

A toolset built for diagrams, not general illustration

The tool set is deliberately narrow: select, pen, rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, and text, each bound to a single letter key (V, P, R, E, L, A, T). Hold ⇧ while drawing to constrain a rectangle to a square or snap a line to 45°. It's fast precisely because it isn't trying to be a full illustration app — it's trying to be the fastest way to turn "let me draw this" into a diagram.

Six templates for the diagrams you draw most

Most technical diagrams fall into a handful of shapes, so inkwell ships six ready-made templates that load pre-arranged and fit themselves to the viewport automatically:

• Flowchart — Start, two steps, and End with arrows.
• Mind Map — a central topic with six branches.
• Org Chart — a lead with two managers and three reports.
• Sequence Diagram — two actors with request / response / callback arrows.
• Timeline — four milestones on a horizontal axis.
• Venn Diagram — two overlapping labelled sets.

Load one, relabel the boxes, and you have a working diagram in under a minute instead of building the layout from scratch.

Notes and drawing, side by side

Press ⌘/ or click the note icon in the top-right of the canvas to slide in a markdown notes panel at half the canvas width. The canvas stays fully interactive while it's open, so you can jot down the reasoning behind a diagram — why this box connects to that one — without switching away from either. Those notes save separately to .inkwell/canvas-notes.md, still just another plain text file in your vault.

Full tool reference, shape styling options, and keyboard shortcuts are in the Canvas docs.