Sliding Panes (Andy Matuschak Mode) Plugin

I haven’t properly tested, but I’d say so. If you don’t, it might still work fine (though you won’t be able to toggle it off)

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Is there an “installation guide” for non-technical users?

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@yalcin:

To install a plugin, simply place the plugin files inside the folder MyVault/.obsidian/plugins/my-plugin/.

Source: Announcement on the #insider channel.

You need to create the plugins folder manually.

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Actually I did, and then I copied the files into another folder I named “andy mode”. Obsidian either does not recognize it as a pluging or there is something else I need to do?..

oh - it needs to be turned on from 3rd party plugins :slight_smile: thanks!..

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Got this working with the new version of Minimal :smile: The rotated title CSS is buggy though.

This is what it looks like on Minimal and on Nord:

Images

Minimal

Nord

Thank you so much for this plugin! I’ve been thinking for a while that I should figure out how to get sliding panels into themes I like using but now I don’t have to! Working beautifully with Blue Topaz (just switched to that theme today).

I was also a little lost with the readme at first but got it working. One thing I forgot about was how to display hidden folders on MacOS to get to the .obsidian folder.

Small update to the plugin available now to fix issues with extra padding in sidebars:

Yeah, the readme was unclear. I’ve hopefully made it a bit clearer for this release, but I haven’t accounted for the hidden dotfiles on mac yet. I should add that. Thanks for pointing it out :+1:

For those having issues with the Minimal theme, @kepano made some updates to make it work better with this plugin (thanks @kepano :sunglasses:), so you might have to update your theme

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Not specific to this plug-in: is there a way to update third party plug-ins from within Obsidian, or at least receive notifications that an update is available?

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Not yet. It’s planned for the future (alongside some sort of plugin directory) but at the moment we just have the plugin loader so we can feel out what we need for the API.

Disclaimer: I’m not a developer so I have no idea if these feature ideas are possible for the plugin.

It would be amazing if pinning a note would make the edges of that note a new edge upon which notes will stack. This would mean you could easily bring notes into permanent focus when you need to compare them with another note and simply unpin when you no longer need to compare. This might be comparable to the UX of Roam’s sidebar workflow.

Another potential upgrade to replicate Roam, though I’m not sure how easy it would be, is if we could shift-click a note title to rearrange a note to the far left and pin it like above. This would replicate Roam’s ability to move notes from the “sidebar” into the left-most pane.

If a note is already pinned on the left-most pane, then shift-clicking a note title could move it to the second-left pane, which would also then make it easy to rearrange “sidebar” notes in the case that you have too many headers stacked up.

For example, I have 10 notes open, I want to compare Note 7 with all of the other notes, I simply shift-click the title to move it to Note 1 position, then pin it to keep it in focus while I scroll the other notes. If I then want to compare Note 1 to Note 10, Note 2-9 would be stacked in between, so I shift-click Note 10 title to move it to Note 2 position, and so on.

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I don’t know if feature requests for the plugin should be sent here or as issues on Github but I would love an option to change the orientation of the title/filename in the sidebar (somehow I prefer tilting my head left than to the right to read it).

I would also be rude not thanking you for the great work, @death.au :slight_smile:

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@death.au Just dropping by to say thank you! Love the plugin!

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is there a config or something to change the size of the unfocused note? Right now it’s much bigger than I’d like it to be. I’d be okay with it peaking, but right now it is overpowering.

Please add a slide-off mode. When panels open to a fixed width.
As it was in the first versions: Andy Matuschak mode
This mode is useful when I compare information in several notes.

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As an option.

Yes, of course. That’s what I meant.
If it will still be turned on and off by the hotkey, it will be great

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On second thoughts, I think my idea can be simplified by setting the in-focus panel to never scroll out of view or be covered by other panels, so that its edges effectively become the edges on which other panels stack. (See screenshots)

To be clear, although I use the word locked in the screenshots, I don’t mean locking the position of the panel. You could scroll it to the left or right hand side, but it would never scroll out of focus. This means if you want to change the panels that you’re comparing, it would just be a case of scrolling until the other panel appears, or clicking the other panel into focus.

One thing that might not be ideal about this implementation is having a lot of unused space (titles) between the panels being compared, making it hard to switch your eyes between them. This could be resolved by adding a function to shift-click the title of a panel to rearrange it and make it the next panel over from the one that’s in-focus.

I’ve released a small update:

  • Add a setting to disable rotated headers
  • Update focusLeaf to scroll just far enough to make a leaf fully visible if it’s out of view to the right (thanks to Eric Hall)
  • Activate adjacent leaf when active leaf is closed (thanks again, Eric)
  • Close leaves which happen to have a file open that is deleted

There’s still a lot I want to do, so I’ve taken some time to add a bunch of issues to GitHub to keep track: Issues · deathau/sliding-panes-obsidian · GitHub

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Is it possible my sliding pane moves smoothly as the plugin preview (on GitHub)? For additional information, my operating system is Windows 10.

Btw thank you for making this plugin!

Edit : Nvm, I found the solution. I should activate this in the control panel (Advance system setting > Advanced > performance)
image

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