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Orqa Note

Excalidraw canvas

Open .excalidraw files as a full-tab canvas editor for sketches, flow diagrams, and whiteboarding.

Opening a canvas

Double-click any .excalidraw file in the sidebar. It opens as a full-tab canvas — the same Excalidraw experience you'd get on excalidraw.com, embedded directly in the app and reading the local file as the source of truth.

What the canvas is for

  • Freehand sketches — flow diagrams, system sketches, quick mockups
  • Whiteboarding ideas before they're polished enough for a proper design tool
  • Annotated screenshots — drag an image in, draw arrows and notes around it
  • Workshop artefacts — stickies, swimlanes, retrospective boards

Files on disk

Saved canvases are standard .excalidraw JSON files. They're portable across Excalidraw clients (web app, VS Code extension, other Excalidraw-compatible tools), commit cleanly to Git, and survive Orqa Note being uninstalled.

Creating a new canvas

  • Right-click in the sidebar → New File → Excalidraw, or
  • Create an empty file ending in .excalidraw from Finder. Orqa Note opens it as a fresh canvas.

What's not supported

Excalidraw blocks inside a markdown document are not yet supported — sketches live as their own files. Most PM workflows benefit from this anyway: the canvas is its own thing, linked from a PRD rather than buried inside one.