Outline "Snap To" Location in Note // Auto-Scroll

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

Currently, if I click on a heading within a note that is above or below the visible portion of the note outline, I have to scroll the outline itself to find my heading.

If I click on a heading that’s already visible in the outline, its highlighted, which is wonderful. But if the heading is beyond the visible portion of the outline, I have to go find it.

Proposed solution

I would like to have the note outline “snap to” the heading for my cursor location in the note itself.

So, I would scroll through the note until I got to the heading where I wanted to work. When I click the heading or the text beneath, the outline would snap to that location, displaying the heading where I’m working.

This would allow me to quickly view nearby headings, without having to manually find my place in the outline.

Current workaround (optional)

Scroll in the outline to find your place. I’ve seen that some people have suggested using numbered headings to help find your place more quickly.

Related feature requests (optional)

6 Likes
2

Per Rigmarole: “Including: if you use the command Open outline of the current file , it should scroll to the header position you were at when you ran the command.”

1 Like
3

Workaround: The Quiet Outline plugin supports this. (It includes some other nice features too, but also has some tradeoffs, including lack of drag-drop rearranging.)

1 Like
4

Do you mean you can’t drag drop rearrange in the outline, or in the note?

But you can do this with the core Obsidian outline?

5

In the core Outline you can rearrange sections of the note by dragging its headings around in the Outline tab. In Quiet Outline you can’t.

1 Like
6

+1 for this. It would only make sense for Obsidian to have that option as every IDEs have it. It was my instinct to look for it. Had to switch to quiet outline to get that behavior. I’d rather use the core plugin instead. Please consider.

1 Like
7

Use case or problem

When I scroll through a document and set the cursor to a new position, the newly selected chapter is nicely selected in the outline-window (of the outline core plugin).

However, if the document is long, the outline itself will get a scroll-bar. When I scroll through such a long document and select a new position, the newly selected chapter may not be visible in the outline at all.

Proposed solution

It would be super nice if the outline would auto-scroll to the newly selected chapter when the user scrolls through the document and puts the cursor in a new place.

1 Like
8

We intentionally decided not to do it. If the outline follows the scroll position of the document, it becomes harder to use the outline itself to jump between locations.
Every time you want to jump somewhere using the outline, you need to scroll it and then click.

9

Would it be possible to make it an option? So that we can choose.

1 Like
10

In my opinion, it is the opposite. In very long documents, with a lot of sub headings, it takes a time to find where we are in the documents. It’s useful to be able to instantly see what’s surrounding the current section without having to scroll through and unfold headings, etc.

I’m not arguing to make this a feature that would be enabled by default, but I think this would be a fairly simple and nice to have optional feature.

Please reconsider.

Until then, I’ll be using the quiet outline plugin that I redesigned to look exactly like the built-in feature using custom CSS.

2 Likes
11

That snippet would make a great Share & showcase post!

1 Like