Add option to customize default direction of split for new pane

I found this after pane-arrangement already dropped. I don’t think it’s solved the problem.

Vertical pane is pretty dire on a laptop. Too little horizontal resolution to manage a file picker pane, two notes, and a backlinks pane–especially at full huge font size, but even with one Cmd-Minus down.

Mine’s a little worse than normal because I use monospace for editing and so text is wider. But I don’t think that’s very rare and vertical pane arrangement is still bad with the default font.

Also, with default vertical split, the entire pane interface is vertical either by default or by design. That makes it a little hard to immediately determine which 400px-wide slice full of text is the one I want. It’s almost vital at 1536x960 effective native resolution on a MacBook Pro 16 to use vertical space over horizontal for splits if you want the navigation features exposed and don’t want extreme word wrap every couple/few words.

So I’m currently having to micromanage pinning, and either pre-split or rearrange new notes to horizontal every time (which is getting tough, because the split dragging is buggy in 0.82 and springs back). I know auto-hover tweaks and other CSS hacks can help, but I feel like vanilla should work smoothly as delivered, especially since I planned on paying for it.

I’d really, really prefer an option to default to horizontal for all new panes on top of a pin, with cmd-split, etc. I pretty much never want vertical panes ever and want to specify that.

14 Likes

I like using Obsidian in a vertical-displayed monitor(9:16, I don’t know how many people do the same with me), and there are some problems that come along with this:

  1. The new pane is set to open on the right side by default when ctrl+clicking on a link. But I need it to be open it at the bottom most of the time.
  2. The Quick switcher and Command palette are shown at the top of the window. It is really a long way to move the mouse to the palette when I was focusing on the bottom half of the window.

Here are my suggestions on this issues for your reference:

  1. Hold ctrl and click to open on the right side, and hold shift and click to open at the bottom.
  2. Display the palette in a fixed scale position, say 1/4, rather than set to a fixed pixel position.
6 Likes

I use vertical monitor and i have the same problem of the new window opening to the right side.

Another +1 here

If you do splits in mostly only in one direction, then you can ask @death.au to add “Vertical sliding panes” option into Sliding panes / Andy mode plugin.
Default split direction: Horizontal/Vertical

Previous CSS version required to create …

… but the plugin should be able to do it each time automatically according to suggested option saved in settings.

similar requests:

1 Like

Use case or problem

When using the split vertically or split horizontally feature, I’d prefer to be able to control which way (i.e., above or below; and left or right).

At present, it defaults to below and right.

Proposed solution

I think we should have a separate toggle (so split to the right; split to the left; split above; split below).

OR

have a default setting so vertically always means one thing and horizontally always means another.

I prefer the first option as the 2nd is not flexible enough. However, if this is implemented, then the 2nd option would not be so bad:

Current workaround (optional)

It’s cumbersome to have to drag the pin to where you want it after you have split it horizontally or vertically, esp. when you already have a lot of panes. It takes your hands away from the keyboard and disrupts your reading or writing/productivity.

Related feature requests (optional)

2 Likes

Another use case with context:

In my opinion, Obsidian is the perfect WYSIWYM/WYSIWYG side-by-side Markdown environment. With both editor and previewer panels open side-by-side, plus a “navigation” sidebar on the left and a “metadata” sidebar on the right: The horizontal real estate on my screen is spent.

If I could open links in new panels via a horizontal split, then I would have a much easier time working with multiple documents at once.

Note that if you already have two notes open horizontally and then right-click a link to open it in a new pane, the new pane will appear via a horizontal split.

Edit: The new features supporting multiple windows solve for this use case.

How about Ctrl+Click = vertical pane, and Ctrl+Shift+Click = horizontal pane?

Similar situation here: I come from vim where I use the fuzzy search to jump to files. While at the list of files, I can

  • navigate with arrow up/down (just like in Obsidian)
  • hit Enter and it opens the selected file in the current buffer (= pane in Obsidian jargon)
  • hit Ctrl-V and it opens in a vertical split
  • hit Ctrl-X and it opens in a horizontal split

Is there any way to add such a shortcut for the Quick Switcher?