# Canvas Card View

Switches the Markdown file cards of a canvas between their editable preview and a compact link, one card at a time or for the whole canvas. A dense canvas becomes a navigation map; a card you want to edit goes back to its preview in one click.

The card is never converted: it stays a native file card, so its edges, its note identity and its backlinks are untouched. Only its presentation changes.

**Requires the Advanced Canvas plugin** (`advanced-canvas`), version 7 or later. Canvas Card View adds its controls through Advanced Canvas and has nothing to attach to without it.

## Using it

- **One card**: select a single Markdown file card. Its floating menu gets a button that switches it to a link (`[[Note name]]`) and back.
- **Whole canvas**: a button in the canvas controls sends every Markdown card to a link if any card is still a preview, and restores every preview if all are links.
- **Opening a note**: click the link to open the note; Ctrl or Cmd click, or the middle button, opens it in a new tab.

Only Markdown file cards are affected. PDF, image, group, text and web cards are left alone.

## What is guaranteed

- **Presentation only.** Note content is never changed and card types are never converted.
- **A locked canvas is never modified.** The canvas-wide control is hidden and the card control does nothing while a canvas is read-only.
- **One undo step and one save per action**, however many cards change.
- **A missing note is reported, not created.** A card whose note no longer exists shows its link as unresolved; clicking it says so instead of opening an empty note.
- **Unambiguous links.** The text is the shortest one that names the note, as Obsidian would write it, so two notes with the same name in different folders stay distinguishable.

## How it is saved

The state is stored per card in the canvas file, in the card's `styleAttributes`:

```json
{ "type": "file", "file": "Notes/Plan.md", "styleAttributes": { "cardView": "link" } }
```

A card in its preview has no `cardView` entry, and a canvas that never used the plugin is unchanged. Other style attributes on the card are kept.

## Limits

- The plugin relies on Advanced Canvas events and on internal objects of the core Canvas (`canvas.nodes`, `node.getData()`, the floating menu and the canvas controls). An update of either can break it.
- It has no settings: the behavior is meant to stay predictable.

## Install

Not in the community directory yet. To install by hand, build it (below), copy `main.js`, `manifest.json` and `styles.css` into `<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/canvas-card-view/`, and enable it next to Advanced Canvas.

## Development

```bash
npm install
npm test          # model and controller, under jsdom, against a fake canvas
npm run lint      # the official Obsidian ESLint rules
npm run build     # type-check, then bundle main.js
npm run deploy -- <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/canvas-card-view
```

`src/model.ts` holds the data rules and the saved format. `src/controller.ts` holds the toggles, the overlays and the safety rules, and has no Obsidian import: everything the app provides comes through a small interface, which is what lets the tests run it. `src/main.ts` is the Obsidian side.

## License

MIT