I’m not sure, but I’d be curious about the results of any experiments! 
Just tried it out…
Not working 
The moment you choose a vault that’s already open Obsidian activates the already open window.
Is this on the roadmap?
As we are using Electron, perhaps a tabbed approach in place of seperate windows would give us this possibility?
2 Likes
You can do this with nested vaults.
1 Like
I’d just like to bump this a little, since there’s no “voting” on discourse. Even the ability to open read-only windows would be fabulous - I’ve moved my active note-taking to Obsidian and find it great, but the inability to easily open multiple windows to refer to previous meetings, events, notes, etc., is a serious productivity killer.
I typically keep (kept) half a dozen note windows open in Evernote, on different monitors and different portions of the screen, so that I could overlay them with other applications. Having a huge Obsidian window with multiple panes just isn’t a substitute, and it makes co-existing with other applications nearly impossible since it takes over too much of the display.
8 Likes
I have a Macbook Air that I’m running with an external Acer monitor. I’m not able to drag the obsidian window across monitors. I would love to be able to open separate windows. Panes are helpful, but I would prefer windows.
4 Likes
I should also note that Atom is written in Electron, but allows having multiple windows open…
5 Likes
@ryanjamurphy Consider these two topics for inclusion in this overarching feature request thread? They seem to be asking for the same thing.
2 Likes
Hey, I’m trying to write my Digital Garden and Obsidian almost works for me but not quite. The one thing that’s missing is being able to just open as many windows as I want and move them around wherever I want. I’m aware that I can use the panels, but what I’m looking for is more like popout windows. Are there any plans of supporting that? It makes for a very freeing editing experience.
The implementation in Bear is particularly good. I can open up a whole lot of popout windows, and if I click on a wikilink to a note where I already have a popout window open, it takes me to the already open window
8 Likes
+1 - I’ve also been wishing for this.
Floating windows would be awesome for people using multiple monitors.
i.e I could have the main window open for reference material and an editor window open on a second monitor for the document that I’m working on.
22 Likes
I spread my Obsidian window over two monitors, which allows a huge number of panes and can do what you seem to be suggesting you want.
I would, however, support a floating/pop-out window for editing. Many editors, word processors and writing programs have them because it makes writing easier without losing fast access to the other functions. Also for reducing distraction.
In my case, it would enable having multiple documents open and visible and popping them out when I want to write in one.
Multiple windows would also allow to take advantage of the separate spaces in mac os, where you switch the space only on one monitor, and the other stays.
For example I could keep a reference file on my reference monitor and switch between editing my knowledge base and coding (or whatever else) on the main monitor.
I tried opening the same vault twice, but that doesn’t work (which is probably a good thing).
1 Like
There is a way of doing this.
Put the folder with the files into another folder. Create a new vault from that folder.
You will then have all the files in two vaults, each of which can open a window. So you can open the file in the new folder without any impact on your workspace settings in the first vault.
Nesting can be very useful, so long as you are careful.
3 Likes
+1 I really like this idea. Pop-out windows make the Obsidian a lot more versatile by allowing the built-in features of whatever desktop environment the user is running to be used to organize Obsidian windows. 
1 Like
The problem is that one window is an Electron limit, as I understand it.
+1. Can’t wait having large window of local graph on separate monitor.
6 Likes
Definitely +1 ~ Does anyone know if this feature request has been added in the roadmap?
@Dor ~ Just wondering: does the “Electron limit” mean floating Windows will not be a possibility in Obsidian? Or, might there be another, different way to eventually provide this built-in functionality?
In the meantime, thanks for explaining your “nested vault” workaround! I look forward to giving it a try.
@Metta, you can find the roadmap in the footer on the main site. Here’s a direct link.
Looks like it’s not on the roadmap yet.
2 Likes
In terms of implementation, it looks like spawning the window isn’t the hard part. Electron has had that functionality since at least 2016. I think @Silver was alluding to issues with syncing state between windows?
Issues I can see:
- Users could open the same document twice in different windows; expected behavior is (probably) that one mirrors edits made the other without changing its cursor location in the file. Probably could do some IPC to mirror edits between windows.
- Multiple instances could save metadata at the same time and clobber each other. Plugins are more likely to hit this issue. Could possibly delegate all metadata calls to the main window via more IPC.
- Dragging tabs between windows would be a minor nuisance, but probably isn’t the end of the world.
- Obsidian would need to stop redirecting you to the already-opened vault. I think this is a matter of taste; you could argue that this behavior should be kept and a menu/command item would better suit the needs of most users.
- Dragging and dropping a tab outside of the window would need to spawn a new window.
It looks like there’s some work needed to tailor current app behavior to match this feature, and the rest boils down to IPC.
Maybe I missed something or got the current state of affairs wrong. Let me know. 
7 Likes
@jcrpaquin ~ Many thanks for your thoughtful and thorough feedback! Although I’m not a coder, I do appreciate having a little more insight into what might be required to provide this (helpful) feature.
Would be delighted to see floating windows eventually make it into the roadmap, if it eventually turns out to be feasible.
FWIW, my frame of reference for floating/synced windows is (primarily) from working with TheBrain.
3 Likes