I think you misunderstood my point. The fact that the Hover Editor is forced to use non-API functionality means that it will be very difficult to maintain the plugin, Hover Editor. It will frequently break because it is using functionality that is not guaranteed to remain stable. Thus even though there is a plugin that (to a small degree) resolves this, it is still important that this feature be either incorporated into the API or implemented as a native feature.
To your second point, I’m saying that using Hover Editor is quite distracting. It’s very different in my opinion from natively implemented transclusions as you can experience in Roam, Notion, and many other apps. It is a UI issue for the most part but simply having to interact through a separate window is quite distracting when I’m trying to edit an outline.
Not to mention that:
It does not work on mobile, and I do at least a quarter of my note taking on mobile
There are many features that don’t work with it, like “find”
I basically exclusively use the keyboard when writing, using keyboard shortcuts and the cursor for navigation. I very rarely use the mouse. This is probably why the hover editor is very foreign to me. When I go to make a change to a transcluded block, with the cursor, it simply collapses back to the line of code that has the embedding. Then I have to go back up, then hover over with my mouse, etc etc.
Are any of these absolutely a disaster? No. But to me transclusions are really useful. And once you’ve used a really smooth implementation like Roam’s it’s hard to use this implementation and find it to be pleasant.
To be clear I love obsidian. It’s just one of the things I miss. And I strongly disagree that this is something that comes down to a philosophical issue between obsidian and roam. Transclusions do not require a database or a block-based system. The fact that they are able to very efficiently render the embedding, means that it can be edited. And the fact that embedding seems to be quite popular implies to me that it would be worthwhile to extend it. I think that most people would prefer embeddings to be editable and the vast majority of the rest dont mind either way. So if it’s not overwhelming technically I think it’s a no brainer in terms of being a non-controversial feature addition.
Not saying it’ll be trivial by any means. Just that I think it’s something that would be valuable to have and that few if any would be unhappy about
The inability to edit transclusions in-place significantly slows down my workflow. Many of my top-level documents are 99% transclusions. I therefore cannot edit them in any kind of smooth manner, but am forced to jump back and forth between documents.
Gotcha. I don’t know Roam and Notion, nor any other note-taking app that does transclusions. But I get you point and if there is a way to make editing transclusions smoother, less distracting or slowing down one’s workflow, I am are all for it.
Good point, although Workflowy is an outliner note app, like Roam and Dynalist, not like Obsidia, Bear, Evernote, or the plethora of other similar note-taking apps.
This would be a game-changer for me. Does anyone on this forum have a sense how likely it is that the ability to edit transclusions in place will be implemented in the not too distant future? I love Obsidian but will switch to Logseq (which does this beautifully) if there is no movement on this.
We don’t know yet, the dev hasn’t given any additional information yet, but I (wildly) guess it will be released as part of Obsidian October - meaning some time mid / end November? The dev told me that initially it will enable editing transcluded whole notes, and transcluding blocks will come later. So if you can’t wait, it may be better to move to another software.
As alternatives of direct editing, you can consider Hover Editor, or if it’s about task management, use the Tasks plugin which allows you to edit embedded tasks from anywhere.
Thanks so much for the wonderful Hover Edit. Is it possible to customize the offset distance of the popup editing window? I looked through the source files but I am not experienced and didn’t see anything that looked like offset distance. If it were a little farther away I could see more of the transcluded text. Thanks!