Focusing pane based on predictable cycling

Feature requests
1

I appreciate the new 0.7.4 hotkeys for focusing pane (top, bottom, left, and right). But this does not always work, esp. if you have a pane on the top and two bottom ones.

I think it would be more useful to have predictable cycling when it comes to focusing on panes (this doesn’t have to replace the current set up necessarily, but I think this is the more useful way of doing about it). For example, alt + tab (at least on a Mac) does this but it’s unintuitive. It not only cycles to the viewable panes, but it also cycles to panes that are hidden in the sidebars and the search result, so it’s pretty annoying and not intuitive.

I think predictable cycling is more useful (e.g., alt + tab or alt + shift+tab or whatever) because no matter what your pane layout is, there is a predictable way to get anywhere on your screen. The current set up with assigning something for top, bottom, left, right doesn’t work for all setups and can be difficult to remember depending on which hotkeys you configure.

EDIT: also, when cycling, I don’t think it should focus on the title bar as it currently does.

EDIT2: Based on a new feature request (Hotkey to cycle through sidebar elements (notes, etc.)), I want to clarify that this feature request should cycle through all panes that are presently viewable (so panes from both the default/main view as well as the ones from the sidebar[s]).

9 Likes
2

I second this request.

1 Like
3

This is really a problem since remembering the different hotkeys for left, right, bottom, top is hard and not intuitive. I think a good solution would be to use ctrl + tab, as in most programs with tabs. Then it cycles through every pane, or maybe even the last two used. For more advanced use the current hotkeys can be used.

2 Likes
4

Perhaps a system like tmux can be used. Pressing ctrl+b overlays a numerical label for each pane. Pressing a number switches focus to that pane.

5

Maybe the new plugin https://github.com/phibr0/cycle-through-panes is useful

2 Likes
6

To work well with workspaces with possibly many panes like Andy mode, idea from @plep could use letters instead of digits. 1. There is more of them, 2. They are directly available on limited laptop keyboard with non-English layout.

Related feature requests:

for fast navigation among list of some items:

7

yes, this plugin works perfectly! This feature request should be considered resolved.

1 Like
8

The plugin is nice, but this is worth to be a part of the core if Obsidian wants to be like an IDE. Think about Chrome without Ctrl-Tab.

2 Likes