What is pinstar?

Pinstar is a canvas file editor that runs inside your terminal. It works specifically with the .canvas file format used by Obsidian, a popular note-taking app. Instead of needing a graphical window, you interact with it through a text-based interface directly in your command line. What it solves is simple: if you have Obsidian canvas files and want to view or edit them without opening Obsidian itself, pinstar gives you a lightweight alternative that runs entirely in the terminal. You can pan around the canvas, zoom in and out, navigate between connected nodes, and edit node content inline. The tool reads and writes the .canvas file format faithfully, supporting text nodes, file nodes, link nodes, and group nodes. Each node is tracked by a unique identifier to keep connections intact. There are some known limitations: node titles can get overwritten in a way that differs from how Obsidian handles them, and images are rendered as plain nodes rather than actual images. You can install it either via Cargo (the Rust package manager) with a single command, or download a pre-built binary from the Releases page. Pre-compiled packages are available for several Linux distributions. The README notes that building from source requires Rust version 1.85 or newer. The project is written in Rust and uses Ratatui, a library for building terminal user interfaces.