While the ability to tear off panes into their own windows (like Chrome or JetBrains) would be ideal, I’m very happy to find the symlink workaround, it’s working for me now, as the main thing I wanted was to be able to have another window open on a separate monitor.
I can report on Windows, that after experimenting with shortcuts, and file and directory “soft links”, the approach that worked was using mklink /J to create a “directory junction”, which is the directory version of a “hard link” on windows. So for each new window I want, I need an extra uniquely-named junction/link somewhere (I just put them in the same parent directory that contains my vault). Not so bad; definitely better than having to nest it in 4 dirs deep.
I also use multiple monitors, that are different sizes and orientations and positions, so simply stretching the window across them, while better than nothing, is far inferior.
Basically I just wanted an extra window or two for my other monitors, and this workaround gives me the ability to do that, so for now I am happy. (There may be some weirdness or drawbacks to discover later with the shared .obsidian dir/cache, we’ll see.)
Thank you to all
(Update: after using this solution for several months, I haven’t really run into any problems or weirdness. I use Dropbox with and without Cryptomator to store and sync my vaults (one encrypted, one not), and access them from both Windows and Mac OS, as well as the unencrypted one on iOS using Editorial and 1Writer (which have built-in Dropbox support) and occasionally on Android via Markor and Dropsync (less convenient as Dropsync can be slow, but still works fine.)
Hi, I am just passing by. To everyone reading the previous comment. We don’t explicitly support neither nested vaults nor this hack with symbolic links. You are free to do whatever you want, but you are on your own.
Just writing to say that this set of features would be really awesome.
Another usecase where a floating window would be useful is when you have another app in full screen (say, a conference in Zoom) and want to take notes in live. With floating windows, you can just put a note in small window in a corner.
nope, when aspect ratios & resolutions are different for each monitor it looks janky AF.
so extending it to multiple windows is not an universal solution.
This is for people with multiple screens. It would be great to detach a view (or at least detach a view from the main window) to have on a separate screen
How are people solving this problem currently? Is there a method for getting the benefit of multiple windows that doesn’t involve potentially problematic workarounds like symlinks?
I saw a reference to using the Andy mode sliding panels plugin. (I can’t find the link now–it was on reddit.) That seems like it would work.
My current workaround is to open a note in another text editor app (using “Open in default app” option). In my case, I use Byword: it auto-saves like Obsidian, offers decent markdown support, and doesn’t mess up my files in any way.
Admittedly this loses you any Obsidian functioning (multiple panes, quick switcher, auto-complete links, etc), but it works for me when I want a single note split-screened with my web browser when taking notes while researching.
Thank you for this!!! All I wanted for multi displays was to toss a live view of my graph up on the TV while keeping my workspace on my laptop (or vice versa) - this workaround does the trick perfectly! Thank you thank you thank you
What OS did you do this on? I couldn’t get it to work on Mac, (symlink works fine, but opening up the symlink in Obsidian, while main vault is already open, does not open a new instance of Obsidian; it just does nothing)
I’m using this hack on linux, and it’s working pretty well, althougt i only open two instance of obsidian at max. Not tested on mac, but it should work as the underline commads are the same. Maybe, try to create the symbolic vault in a diferent work directory tree, outside the vaults base dir.
