I’ve been diving deep into the possibilities of customizing Obsidian, and I’ve found the sidebar to be a crucial aspect of my workflow. It’s fascinating to see how different layouts and pins can create a personalized experience that boosts productivity.
As we all strive for that perfect setup, I thought it would be incredibly insightful (and fun!) to learn more about what works for everyone else. I’m very curious to discover new approaches and maybe incorporate some of your strategies into my own system.
So, I invite you to share your favorite sidebar layouts and pins. Whether you’ve got a sleek minimalist design or a highly organized powerhouse, all setups are welcome!
Just an idea: I have multiple workspaces of course, but I’ve lately started using multiple instances of backlink panes and have 3-4 search modal panes as well.
For the backlinks, one I used normally, the other one for filtering with searches.
Search is automatically triggered (from the Editor or Bookmarks) in the first or original modal so if one wants those results in a second or third pane, cut the query and paste it somewhere else). This way I can keep various queries in place and hop between them.
How to make more of the same thing
To duplicate backlinks, you can
drag the backlinks icon to the main editing area in the middle and split right/down to duplicate it and then move the two instances wherever you like;
open the backlink in Hover editor (third-party plugin) and dock it back and then move it to another sidebar position.
For doing the same thing for the search modal, you can install Floating Search and then dock those to make duplicates. There may be other ways to do it.
I also have two instances of the Properties pane.
So for example if I open Copilot which hogs the right side of the screen, I can click on one of the icons (backlink, properties view, whatever) on the left sidebar – which sidebar can be halved or cut into three smaller panes so one can populate these icons.
I think setting the workspace at 83-91 percent zoom level helps with better accomodation of duplicates as well.
Mind you, these core Obsidian pane duplicates DO NOT need to be pinned. I don’t usually like sidebar items pinned but sometimes it’s necessary of course.
I’m mostly not using the sidebar, but I’m heavily using the Developer Tools in that right location. However, I do have a few pins which I tend to use every now and then:
In my personal vault I’ve got a note listing all tasks I’m currently working on. This is a combination of lifting tasks from daily notes, and some globally tagged tasks. It also shows other decorated tasks marked with the current date, to help me identify what happened so far on this day
I’m also using both the all properties and the current file properties view in the sidebar
Before the property update I also made my own Active File view, which splits up the various metadata information available into different sections, so it has sections for lists, tasks, file information and field information