Show HN: ThinkBoard – Summon an Obsidian canvas above your desktop with a hotkey

ThinkBoard, a new open-source desktop app from developer vestigecounty, summons an Obsidian canvas as an overlay above every window via a global hotkey or a four-finger swipe on macOS. ThinkBoard edits Obsidian's .canvas files in place, merging changes card by card, and its optional Ask AI feature sends the full chain of cards leading to a selected card as the prompt to a local model through LM Studio or Ollama, or to OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Together AI, Fireworks AI, Mistral or DeepSeek with a pasted key. The app ships for macOS, Windows and Linux, with a Homebrew install via vestigecounty/tap/thinkboard and prebuilt binaries on GitHub.

Summon a board directly above your desktop with a hotkey or a gesture. · macOS · Windows · Linux · https://github.com/vestigecounty/thinkboard/actions/workflows/ci.yml Website https://vestigecounty.github.io/thinkboard/ · Issues and ideas on GitHub https://github.com/vestigecounty/thinkboard/issues · Chat on Discord https://discord.gg/pNyspdkP4 Similar to the old macOS Dashboard. Open your existing Obsidian vault's boards, or run standalone. Cards, links, Markdown and pictures, saved straight back to the .canvas file. Grow your board as far as you need. ThinkBoard uses smart clustering — zooming out collapses groups of cards into single, named clusters. Pinch in and the cards come back. If you hook up AI, choosing Ask AI on any card sends the entire chain of cards leading to it as the prompt. Nothing to explain in a chat: the context is already on the board. Dump your thoughts on the board, then select them and choose Auto-layout to tidy up in left-to-right or top-to-bottom order. Or turn on Auto-layout in the board's menu, and each card will place itself automatically. ⌘K opens the command palette with quick access to every function and every setting. Choose from built-in themes — or let ThinkBoard pick up your vault's own Obsidian theme by itself. - Summon over anything — An overlay above every window, on a global hotkey or a four-finger swipe. Esc puts it away. - Fast to build — Drag out of a card's edge to make the next one, type Markdown in place, auto-layout to tidy. - Your whole vault — ⌘O lists every board in the vault, newest first, with fuzzy search. Its notes and pictures drop straight onto a board. - Command palette — ⌘K or ⌘P for every action and every setting, its shortcut beside it. - macOS niceties — Pinch to zoom, swipe with four fingers to summon, your wallpaper behind the board. - Keyboard all the way — Arrows move between cards by where they sit, Tab adds a linked one, Enter edits. - Make it yours — Ten built-in themes, previewed live — or your vault's own Obsidian theme, followed by itself. Boards are Obsidian's own canvases. ThinkBoard edits them in place and keeps every field it doesn't use, so the file stays as Obsidian writes it. Keep the same board open in both: a change on either side is merged card by card, never written over, and a rename in Obsidian is followed. ~/Vault/Trips/Kyoto.canvas Learning Japanese → Phrases → Where is the station? → Eki wa doko desu ka? Off until you choose a provider. Run a model on your own machine with LM Studio or Ollama, or paste a key for OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Together AI, Fireworks AI, Mistral or DeepSeek. - Press Pause the default hotkey, configurable to summon or dismiss the board — or, on a Mac, swipe down with four fingers. - Double-click a card to edit it; Esc or Cmd/Ctrl+Enter when you're done. - Drag from a card's edge the little dot onto another card to connect them, or onto empty board to make a new one. - Right-click a card for actions Ask AI, color, auto-layout for a selection… , or right-click empty space for board options like Auto-layout. - Cmd/Ctrl+O switches boards: pick your vault once Settings → Vault , or "Open vault…" in the command palette and it lists every board in it. Without a vault it's the ordinary open dialog. - Cmd/Ctrl+K or Cmd/Ctrl+P opens the command palette; Cmd/Ctrl+F finds text on the board; Cmd/Ctrl+, opens settings. - Open or create boards — and reach Settings — from the tray icon. Homebrew macOS : brew install vestigecounty/tap/thinkboard brew services start thinkboard now, and at every login Prebuilt binaries — the latest release: macOS https://github.com/vestigecounty/thinkboard/releases/latest/download/thinkboard-macos-universal.zip Universal .app , Windows https://github.com/vestigecounty/thinkboard/releases/latest/download/thinkboard-windows-x86 64.zip x86-64 .zip , Linux https://github.com/vestigecounty/thinkboard/releases/latest/download/thinkboard-linux-x86 64.tar.gz x86-64 .tar.gz . Every release is on the Releases https://github.com/vestigecounty/thinkboard/releases page. The Mac app isn't notarized by Apple yet, so macOS blocks the first launch of a download: open it once, then choose Open Anyway in System Settings → Privacy & Security or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ThinkBoard.app . Homebrew doesn't flag what it installs as downloaded, so installed that way it opens straight away. From source — with a recent Rust toolchain 2024 edition : cargo build --release ./target/release/thinkboard The patched iced crates it relies on are vendored in-repo, so there's nothing else to set up. AI is off by default — nothing leaves your machine until you configure a provider. In Settings → AI , choose one and, for a hosted provider, paste an API key; then pick a model from the list the provider serves. Keys are kept per provider, so switching between them doesn't lose the others. Then right-click any card and choose Ask AI . Tweak everything from Settings the command palette, or the tray menu , or edit the config file directly: - macOS / Linux: ~/.config/thinkboard/config.json - Windows: %APPDATA%\thinkboard\config.json Released under the MIT License https://github.com/vestigecounty/thinkboard/blob/main/LICENSE .