Freehand Note Layout

I used to use OneNote a lot and one of the features I really loved was the ability to just kinda take blocks of your note and move them around however you see fit, easily putting things side by side or off to the side.

One application where I found this particularly useful was when I was writing some kind of “main content” that goes down on the left side of the screen, and occasionally add “auxiliary content” or little sidenotes on the side when I don’t want to break the flow of the main content.

I switched to Evernote for a while, and have been missing that feature, and am about ready to migrate to Obsidian for various reasons. In Evernote, if I want to add sidenotes I have to add then in between paragraphs or below the relevant content, but this breaks the flow of the main content and can end up stretching things out vertically in an undesirable way, when I want to see more of the main content at once.

Does anyone have thoughts about how to address this need in the Obsidian ecosystem? Should I structure the note differently? Are there plugins that might allow me to lay things out differently? I still want my notes to be nice and readable in plaintext view.

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<aside></aside> tags would be one way to do it. With some css magic you can move them to the sides in preview mode. For an example, look into the ITS Theme snippets

Thanks a bunch! Love the look of that theme, and the examples of asides like you mentioned are very appealing to me!

Much appreciated

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