Hi!
I’ve been using Obsidian for about a month after migrating from a decade-plus with Evernote. Overall I’m loving it, but there’s one oddity which really adds friction. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or just a setting I need to reconfigure.
I’d love to hear from anyone with the same issue or any troubleshooting suggestions to resolve it.
What I’m trying to do
I use multiple Spaces (virtual desktops) on macOS and typically want to have certain notes open on particular Spaces. I’m opening notes in their own window to accomplish this, and things work fine while the notes are open.
However:
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When I close a note, macOS jumps over to the Space which has the main Obsidian window on, pulling me away from what I was in the middle of, and requiring me to manually return to the Space I was on.
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I tried using the “New Note New Window” and “Global Hotkeys” plugins to recreate something I relied on in Evernote: whatever Space I’m currently on, hit a certain key combination, and a new note appears in a new window. I was able to achieve this… but as soon as the new note opens, macOS similarly jumps back to the Space with the main Obsidian window on, adding an extra step of navigating back to the Space I’d been on, where the new note has been opened in its own window.
No other app I use which has multiple windows (e.g. Evernote, Chrome, SublimeText) behaves like this: they would all stay on the same Space when you open or close a window.
Things I have tried
I’ve disabled all Community plugins and almost all the Core plugins.
I’ve checked the settings for Spaces in System Preferences to see if there’s any relevant setting there. The only one which seems relevant (though not precisely matching this case) is “When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application”. This is disabled.
I have also Googled, and searched both the Obsidian subreddit and these forums, but can’t find any discussion of this behaviour.
I don’t think I’m using any Mac apps which would interfere with the UI of another app in this way, so it surprises me nobody else seems to have encountered this.
Is this the expected behaviour? And if not, does anyone have any bright ideas about how I can pin down why it’s happening?
Thanks in advance!