I don’t understand. Is the outline mode an alternative for the current text editor for notes?
Or do you propose we can switch a particular note between outline mode and ‘note taking mode’?
Short answer: I don’t see them as alternative either/or modes of a note, but rather as different note (information) structuring techniques that should be able to be freely intermixed in a single note.
Three use cases to help illustrate:
- During development/iteration of a note: Very often, the earliest written form for me is an outline structure with simple bullet-point sentence fragments, to quickly capture the essential parts and some basic relationships, and then as I iterate on it, over time, parts progressively may get fleshed out into complete paragraphs, headings, etc.
- Final representation of a note: The ‘final’ form of a stable note may very likely still have some parts that are best presented as a true outline with outlining features. For example, the various meta-notes that are discussed elsewhere on this forum like TOCs, MOCs, and the like.
- Edit vs Preview: It is super useful when editing a longer note to have it structured in an outline fashion, with folding, hoisting (focusing), node annotations, hotkeys that move children with parents, etc, even if the final reader rendering is not going to have all this (e.g., for a PDF publication).
I should add: when thinking of outline mode, it is tempting to think purely of each node containing just short sentence fragments, like a list (which is certainly a legit and common use case), but this is limiting; each node may be a full paragraph itself.
+1
I’d also like to see this feature, but I guess the problem is where to store the folding-state information, as being folded or not is not part of the .md content. But aren’t there other plain text editors which achieve that?
2 Likes
It could be stored in the cache file or in another JSON-file inside the .obsidian folder. Other similar information could be stored there, too, e.g. whether the file is in view or edit mode, to support per-file view mode (I have created a separate feature request for this).
Alternatively, it could be stored in a metadata section inside the .md file. I think various ideas for storing metadata at the top or bottom of the .md file are already under discussion.
2 Likes
Vote for this but I think persisting folding information per file is a bit too much, it would make files more cumbersome and less portable. Maybe we can just make default folding level configurable, take Vim as an example.
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@Cito Could you please add link to the request you mentioned into your previous post?
Edit: Thanks for reply ↓.
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Yes 1+. This would give so much more clarity in note lists. It works so good in Roam and keeps the state from last time working on a note.
+1, would love to have this.
Folding is one of the killer features that lures me to adopt Obsidian and leave Evernote. Hope it will gain memory sometime soon.
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+1 for this feature. My intent is to use similar with space repletion and Anki integration a process where inside of the notes are grouped under specific questions.
When I come back to the note, I would like to see only the questions, recall the information from the memory and if I don’t remember it, expand the toggle list to get the answer.
A great example of this technique is explained by Samuel Suresh using Notion in this video (timeframe: 11:48)
Registered to +1 this feature. I thought it was a bug 
As a user when you fold sections you intuitively expect that state to be preserved.
Obsidian is the best! It’s still under appreciated, but I do my best to spread the good news
will be implemented in v0.11
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Woohoo! This is huge
Not only that, a lot of other things are now persisted too in v0.11. Only edit mode is not yet persisted it seems.
But 0.11 is a big step forward again! Obsidian keeps me excited.
Thank you for the feature! Works as expected!
thank you so much for implementing this!! 
in my opinion / for my uses, this is super important.
Is this implemented, I don’t see it it in .12.3 or .12.4 on mac. heading and indent collapse reset to fully open tree every time I leave and revisit the note file. This is for ouliner pane. Thanks!
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If you are talking about the outline pane, then no. This FR is about remebering in note editor/preview collapse state.