Note infinite scroll / opening folder of notes

[tobin]

Outcome
I would like to scroll through my daily notes, as if they were one long document.

Where this comes from
This feature request is inspired by Roam’s daily notes page. I really like that in the daily notes view, one can just scroll forward or back to see previous notes. It’s easy and quick to just quickly scroll over the previous week to remind myself of what was happening, or check if anything fell through the cracks.

Daily notes in Roam

I have daily notes in Obsidian, and I can navigate by clicking through each one or by keyboard shortcut, but I can’t just see a nice flow of my notes going back in time

Daily notes in Obsidian

Proposed Implementation
I think this use case could be solved in quite a nice, general way by allowing a folder of notes to be opened as one pane. Imagine if Ctrl-Clicking a folder opened a pane where all the notes inside were concatenated together with titles between them. Perhaps a folder could have a property “Always open as folder” so that clicking an individual file inside the folder would just jump to that file’s scroll position in the concatenated note.

Other uses for this feature
This implementation could be useful in other places: I sometimes have done writing where I like to keep each section/chapter in a separate markdown file so they can be linked to individually. This would let me view/edit the document as a whole if needed.

[jokysatria]

Love this idea!
Just share my thought for another implementation :
If Andy Matuschak Mode is also well implemented, it’ll be nice if there is an option to bulk open all notes in a folder.

Then we can have unlimited pane and unlimited scroll (vertical and horizontal scroll. this just an example for horizontal scroll)

And the last feature needed is quick switcher for active panes, so we can jump quickly to other pane…

Um, these requests are too many.

[Dor]

@tobin

I would like to scroll through my daily notes, as if they were one long document

Why not make them one long document? Every entry under a header with a date. Easily linked and scrollable.

[death.au]

It’s not quite as convenient as just scrolling, but you can set hotkeys in the option to open today’s note, and to navigate back and forward between daily notes, which might help your use case. Obviously only works with the daily notes, though.

[rigmarole]

This idea has also been discussed here: Document Spanning

Comparing it to the multiple document views of Scrivener and Ulysses.

[I-d-as]

Love it.

In the meantime, if there was an option to embed notes in full, without scrollbars, which I also would love, something like this is possible, if I am not mistaken.

I guess it would not be as directly editable, but one click away isn’t so bad, especially if you have the composite note pinned and the pane split with the specific daily note you are editing on the other pane.

Thanks.

[juen]

Workaround that might help you until it’s implemented:

Script that generates weekly review notes (named 2020-W40 etc) that have all daily notes of the week embedded in them for fast reviewing!

Could adapt the script to embed also all daily notes of a month or a year…

Calendar and tasks for daily notes

Did you get it to work? Might interest you too: I wrote some Python that generates a note for each week with the daily notes of that week already transcluded. Want to use that for my weekly review and have them directly linked in my calendar note [weekly_review] def getDatesfromWeek(year,week): # create list of isoformat dates for a given year & week firstdayofweek = datetime.datetime.strptime(f'{year}-W{week - 1}-1', "%Y-W%W-%w").date() dates = [] for i in range(7): da…

[tobin]

@jokysatria Thanks for the pointer to that, I really like the horizontal scroll implementation. I think it solves a different use case from my idea – I wouldn’t particularly like having to open all the daily notes. But the two ideas are compatible! I like both!

@Dor That’s true, and perhaps I will move that way. The main drawback for me is if make a link to a future note, I then see it as a backlink when I come to that day. It’s a nice way of scheduling. There isn’t currently a concept of per-header backlinks.

@rigmarole Thank you for linking to that! I hunted for a previous discussion, which I thought must exist, but didn’t find the search terms. I’m happy that it has been discussed before. I think our proposals are very similar.

@juen Thank you for that script. It might be a part of my solution for the moment.

[joshua]

I just wanted to see if there has been any implementation of this in a plugin, or if it has been considered as a core feature. I’ve been using Logseq beside Obsidian in order to have a daily notes infinite scroll feature, because I can keep it up all day and just brain-dump and easily cross-reference to other days. But I would really love to have that feature in Obsidian and keep it all in one place.

[concentration]

Same here. If anyone has any new plug-in suggestions or workflow ideas I’d like to hear.

[maciejk]

+1 I really miss this feature after switching from Roam.

[morav]

+1 Yeah, it would be good

[pylk]

I would love a scrolling view of a directory. Right now I’m basically searching through my notes in bash with cat * | less, lol!

Bonus feature: Filter by filename, i.e. enter a regex \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} and it will only display files that start with a date

Another bonus feature: Filter by tags. i.e. if you enter #project1 it will only display files that contain that tag in the file

[pylk]

Or: Obsidian already has a search feature. What if the results of a search could be rendered in a normal webview instead of the tiny sidebar? Then you could search for e.g. #project1 and get the same result

[ycs]

+1. miss that from Roam

[CawlinTeffid]

You can drag the edge of the sidebar to make it not tiny.

On Obsidian Mobile you can’t do that, but the sidebar has a “maximize” icon next to the tab name (where it say “Search” or “File Explorer” or whatever’s active there) that expands the sidebar to the whole screen.

[CawlinTeffid]

The Quick Explorer community plugin’s “quick-preview mode” might do what you want:

you can just keep hitting the PgDn key to scroll through the full contents of every note in a folder, as quickly as if they were pages in a notebook, or as scrolling through a single giant document

(Haven’t tried it myself, just found it while browsing plugins and remembered this thread.)