Floating \ Pop-out \ Multiple windows of the same vault

[Spduck]

+1 for this feature. This is one of the big things that causes me to hesitate moving everything over to Obsidian.

[mochsner]

Issue closed as not fixed on Electron’s repository, buuuut, possible for someone to look into this route mentiond on the Electron issue? Multipe instances of an Electron app have problems with localStorage · Issue #2493 · electron/electron · GitHub

I’m assuming Obsidian can detect keyboard/mouse (focus on window) and decide which window to obtain the file “lock” (for writing).

[Shanna]

Adding one more vote for this! Seems like there were a few feature requests in 2020 for a similar function, Now it’s all tracked in this thread?

I’m not even using multiple monitors, just one big one. It’s easier for my brain to be able to visually separate ideas and move them around on the screen.

My work-around is using a seperate markdown editor (Typora, Mark Text) to open individual files for viewing or editing outside of my vault window. The downside is losing some of the functionality of Obsidian, like hotkeys and plugins, meaning I sometimes have to jump into the same note from Mark Text to Obsidian if I’m doing more than just writing text.

Edit to add: I have considered making a vault from a subfolder to have two Obsidian instances open, but it would be nice to avoid that.

[Doum]

+1 for Multi-Window on desktop

[Iv3llios]

+1, it would incredible for multi-monitor setups

[temberature]

ln -s /mnt/external_drive/stock_photos ~/stock_photos

may be similar methods like symbolic-link-linux can work as a solution

[red_co]

nothingislost / obsidian-hover-editor
is it,

[extraMangosPlease]

It would be helpful to be able to open multiple windows– Multi-pane views can be fairly involved, and when it’s time to put one project down because you need to work on something else for a few minutes, it can be somewhat of a dilemma between either dismantling the multi-pane setup you’ve made or saving it as a workspace. Obviously workspaces are perfect in cases where you will re-use one multiple times, but if it’s just a one-off this doesn’t seem like a natural solution. I imagine multiple windows would also be helpful for multi-monitor setups.

[stef.rausch]

Have you seen the nothingislost/obsidian-hover-editor beta plugin? That might be a viable solution for you.

[joethei]

Unfortunately this is not possible without heavy work from the devs, see the FR for that:

Floating \ Pop-out \ Multiple windows of the same vault

(I was surprised that I didn’t see this already in the feature requets — apologies if I’ve missed it.) It would be very helpful to be able to have multiple windows open operating on the same vault. At present it seems I’m limited to just one per vault, which is OK but somewhat limiting. Being able to split the window into panes helps, but I work with multiple monitors and it would be handy to be able to, e.g, put the preview of some note or the graph view on another monitor. It looks to me lik…

The suggested workaround is nested vaults(but that is not officially supported)

[nkonig]

+1 for multiple windows/instances on desktop!

[lysergico]

@mochsner

Issue closed as not fixed on Electron’s repository, buuuut, possible for someone to look into this route mentiond on the Electron issue? Multipe instances of an Electron app have problems with localStorage · Issue #2493 · electron/electron · GitHub

I’m assuming Obsidian can detect keyboard/mouse (focus on window) and decide which window to obtain the file “lock” (for writing).

As usual the user with a highly valuable contribution hasn’t been here in a while (5+mo), probably busy being useful elsewhere. This is a really promising place to start. Quoting you to bring this to people’s attention.

Also this Introducing Portal Windows for Electron

Hopefully devs can take note of this… I’d like to hear what (if any) hope this brings to multiple windows.

[dario006]

Is there any update on this feature?
This tread is a couple of years old now but I can’t find another update on this issue.

This would be a fantastic feature.
Currently using the work around below (opening a folder above as a new vault) but I’m worried I’ll break something doing this.

Thanks!

[chrsle]

Not sure if that’s what you’re looking for; but have you seen the new ‘Hover Editor’ plugin?

[davejdyer]

I’ve considered rolling a hyper-converged Kubernetes cluster between my desktop and the cloud using Azure Arc so I can have one vault per topic in a NetApp files storage backend… Too much? I used to pop open 1-2 instances of OneNote per Windows TaskView desktop, but it just wasn’t good enough for me. Why did I have to discover Markdown? Whyyyyyy…

[OsakaSys]

I can confirm you can do this via Obsidian Sync. Create a new vault and select the original vault to sync. Works similarly to the symbolic link solution, but it’s officially supported.

[Hermann]

Great idea! Thanks!

[WhiteNoise]

This will be worked on in 0.15.x.

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-15-0-insider-build/38948?u=whitenoise

[Andr]

Very glad to see this feature released! Congratulations! This is essential feature for desktop application, in my opinion. Looking forward to test it in regular build for all users.

So long, reading this tread, I was bitterly assured that this is technically impossible, even for Microsoft (see the beginning of this thread)! Will developers provide any technical details about this challenge? Is there any limitations in user experience (compared to classical native desktop multi-window applications)?

[Marc-A]

Brilliant! Thanks for this! Totally sold on it already!