Basic Outliner Features for Obsidian (tab & drag)

Feature archive
1

While a full-blown Outliner like Logseq is perhaps better implemented as a plug-in, it would still be nice to see a couple of small Outliner features in Obsidian that improves the process of outlining your thoughts during ideation.

Use case or problem

When curating information or thoughts, it’s often faster to quickly draft them in an outline and move sections around as you adjust your thinking. Currently, this is a bit cumbersome to do in Obsidian.

Proposed solution

  • When clicking on a bullet, allow users to drag the bullet plus children to another spot (intact)
  • When the cursor is in the text of a bullet and you press tab, indent the bullet (rather than inserting a tab)
2 Likes
2

Concur 100% on the tab issue.

Current Obsidian behavior is inconsistent.

Given a bullet line like this:

- my bullet

The following behavior occurs when pressing Tab: (| represents cursor location)

  • |- my bullet indents the bullet
  • - |my bullet indents the bullet
  • - my |bullet inserts tab character
  • - my bullet| inserts tab character

Similarly, given the following bullet line:

- my indented bullet

(Note: tab character before the bullet, as inserted by Obsidian, not rendering in the forum)

The following behavior occurs when pressing Shift+Tab: (| is again cursor location)

  • | - my indented bullet dedents the bullet
  • |- my indented bullet dedents the bullet
  • - my |indented bullet dedents the bullet
  • - my indented bullet| dedents the bullet

Shift+Tab works the same consistently but Tab does not.

As users we expect the Tab and Shift+Tab to be inverse operations, so they should work consistently together at all times.

1 Like
3

Great examples!

4

There are alredy FR for both things you asking. No need to open new ones.