Andy Matuschak mode

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1

For people who like opening up a bunch of vertical panes and want to scroll between them. Inspired by Andy Matuschak’s Working Notes.

Screenshot

ezgif-7-435f3284f16b
ezgif-7-435f3284f16b800×455 2.42 MB

Instructions:

Copy the snippet into your vault’s obsidian.css file. It should be compatible with whatever other theme you have in there at the time.

/* Andy Matuschak mode! */
.workspace-split.mod-vertical { overflow-x:auto; }
.workspace-leaf, .workspace-split > .workspace-split { min-width: 650px; min-height: 500px; }
.workspace-split.mod-horizontal { overflow-y: auto; }
35 Likes
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Given their popularity and for maximum discover-ability, I would suggest posting two threads separately.

(I’m also starting to worry that you plan to post all your awesome tweaks under the same thread and the title won’t be long enough to display all the awesomeness…)

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Good point. I didn’t want to flood the category, but it makes more sense. I’ll split them up.

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This is so awesome! Thank you so much for sharing this!!!

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Erm… aren’t those vertical panes?

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Yep. A bunch of horizontal splits. My bad. :sweat_smile:
Though it should also scroll vertically through many horizontal panes, also.

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This pretty much has become the default mode for me :slight_smile:

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Is there a CSS of the default dark theme floating around that I could copy this into?

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@brandontoner I think there is, but you shouldn’t have to. If you just put this in obsidian.css with nothing else it should work fine with the default theme.

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Success!! (The CSS File was also case sensitive… Obsidian.css didn’t work, but obsidian.css did)

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I really love this feature!

would there be a way to scroll horizontally using the mousewheel if you hovered it over the horizontal scroll bar? right now I can only drag it with the mouse if I want to scroll to another note.

It also seems I can’t resize the notes in this mode (if I try to move the bar between the notes to make one narrower, it seems to perhaps make the other one wider, but they seem to be at a default width and can’t go smaller)

I’d requested for a feature on discord, and I think others have already requested for it in the forum, to be able to switch between the open notes with a hotkey, so that might solve the issue with needing to scroll/resize

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Try holding shift while scrolling with the mouse

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I don’t think that’s something I can control with CSS, unfortunately :frowning:
I’m lucky I have a horizontal scroll wheel on my mouse, I guess.

Yeah, this css sets a minimum width for the panes (which you can adjust the values of in the css if you like, just change the min-width: value). Resizing panes tries to set the width as a percentage of the container’s width. Which… well, I’m not quite sure what that’s doing in this context, but it just seems to reset to the min-width anyway.

There might be a better solution that allows for resizing panes, but I don’t know what it is yet.

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TIL about shift-scrolling. Don’t know how I’d never come across that before…

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@kard32 For me too. I did not like it when I 1st saw on Andy’s website, but I love it in Obs. Prejudice? Maybe, but I don’t care.

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I wouldn’t worry too much about flooding the topics with threads, it is going to happen regardless. Better to focus instead on tools that allow for increased discover-ability and organization. Like increasing the amount of tags people can use and having a pop up suggestion to add a tag when someone creates a new thread.

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genius! you have just made my life so much easier <3

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Hi @death.au. I have been looking for exactly this, so thanks for doing the hard yards.

However, for an absolute novice, can you explain steps I need to take to ‘copy the snippet into css vault’. Do I need to create a new vault? I have just started using Obsidian and completely unfamiliar with css
Thank you

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Obsidian is rendered the way it is because it has a default css sheet built in.

You can add your own css sheet to you vault and whatever is in that sheet overrides the default settings for that feature.

So, all you need to do to get Andy Mode working is:

  1. close Obsidian;
  2. open a plain text file, copy/paste the AM code to it;
  3. save it as obsidian.css to your vault;
  4. reopen Obsidian.

Tada, you will see Obsidian with the Andy Mode.
Enjoy.

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Thank you @Klaas. This is all new to me, and so unfortunately, I am still unclear regarding step 3.
If Obsidian is closed, how can I save the text to a vault?
I suspect that the vault to which you refer is different to the vault in which Obsidian notes go – the same term to describe two different things.
Can you explain how to ‘save to your vault’? Is that a system file that Obsidian reads when it opens? If so, how do i find it on a Mac, in order to save the file?
Appreciate your help