Managing one’s attention in Obsidian when exploring information is very difficult when compared with how easy Obsidian makes managing ones attention when entering information and creating relationships between files with links and backlinks.
Though Obsidian is elegant and simple (and Durable, from the manifesto), the simplicity stops at the display of the relationships between files (the hierarchy to the left and the graph or local graph views), as soon as I try to do a width first traversal across many relationships (a very natural thing to do after doing depth-first editing), I’m bombarded with foreground tabs and windows which bury the precious relationships I’ve been curating making it very difficult to manage my attention and executive function across this task. A way to manage the behavior of opening links without focus (or in background) would more fully realize the Malleable principle, especially “We believe that tools should adapt to your way of thinking, not the other way around.” - consider that thinking is not the act of filling set of containers and organizing them, though that is certainly part of thinking. Thinking is a process. A flame and not a container. Attention and executive function are core to thinking, and anything we can do to preserve them is sacred to knowledge management.
A universal but optional set of unbound commands is needed to open tabs and windows in the background to achieve parity with each of the following foreground options:
Under Settings in Hotkeys (or in a separate dedicated “click modifiers” section in the settings) add all <modifier + click> commands to be customized in hotkeys. In other words, the defaults would show this way:
Open in new tab (ctrl + click)
Open in new tab to the right (ctrl + alt + click)
Open in new window (ctrl + alt + shift + click)
Implement the following commands in the same section, however, the only valid option when setting the shortcut is to replace the corresponding foreground function. from above. the functions for opening a new tab, a new tab to the right or a link in a window should never be unmapped.
Open in new tab without focus
Open in new tab to the right without focus
Open in new window without focus
Alternately, create a separate section called click modifiers and allow toggling each one individually to normal or without focus.
In the hotkeys implement all these as optional
Move current tab to new window without focus (blank)
New Tab without focus (blank)
Open Current Tab in New Window without focus (blank)
Open Link under cursor in new tab without focus (blank)
Open Link under cursor in a new window without focus (blank)
Open Link under cursor on the right without focus (blank)
The differences between these features which set them apart from similar features which I linked to are that they
can implemented without affecting anyone else or any of the defaults.
can be implemented separately and at different times or partially
At the risk of re-creating Obisidian to be a LISP machine, allowing additional AltGr and right-control as independent modifiers could open up some new possibilities as well as a feature to enable.
I love Obsidian BTW. What I wrote last night above seems to come across as a complaint. I wish there were an edit feature so I could write in a more positive tone! This is what happens when we focus on documenting a problem though.
One thing I missed saying is - I represent a subset of users who have challenges around executive function. Some of us with these challenges tend to gravitate to tools like this one because of how much they can help. I even use and customize obsidian-gtd to consolidate, clarify, organize and do things daily.
Attention can be expensive for us, and at unpredictable times, so anything we can do to control what’s in the foreground can be helpful. The opposite of out of sight out of mind unfortunately is that whatever is in front of us can sometimes be a distraction.
@WhiteNoise, I had not tried that. I just did and that does solve most of my problem, thank you! Specifically, it solves this one from above, which is actually really helpful:
Open Link under cursor in new tab without focus (blank)
Speaking of which, when I wrote this post, I did look to see the feature you said would be implemented in v1.2 in this post was in fact implemented. I must have looked in the wrong place, because now I see if I look at the changelog., I can clearly see: “Added Editor setting to open new tabs in the background.”. So now I know where to look.
The others realistically aren’t much needed by me, but I can imagine that if Obsidian really became a part of me, that I benefit and possibly others would too:
Move current tab to new window without focus (blank)
New Tab without focus (blank)
Open Current Tab in New Window without focus (blank)
Open Link under cursor in a new window without focus (blank)
Open Link under cursor on the right without focus (blank)
Of those 5, these 3 below are honestly kind of UNIX-y. I remember having a workflow in fvwm2 or another window manager, perhaps WindowMaker where pushing windows to the background was a nice thing to have. Features like these probably aren’t necessary for the way we work with Tabs now. Generally if you are tearing off tabs into another window you are about to use that window:
Open Current Tab in New Window without focus (blank)
Open Link under cursor in a new window without focus (blank)
Move current tab to new window without focus (blank)
This one is probably useless…:
New Tab without focus (blank)
This one might be useful but probably limited.. Nice for throwing something up for reference from a page, while then working down that page.
Open Link under cursor on the right without focus (blank)
