When changing workspaces, the right and left sidebars are empty after loading the new workspace.
This happens with every workspace. Quiting and restarting Obsidian results in appropriately populated sidebars.
This seems like a bug, but perhaps there is something I do not understand about the sidebars?
The sidebar elements are part of the workspace. Which means you need to save the workspaces with whatever sidebar elements you want. The strong suit of workspace management is that you can have different layout and functionality.
If before you close Obsidian you switch back to a workspace well populated with sidebar elements, then it is true. Otherwise you would start up with the last active workspace, which may not have sidebar items set up.
All of the above reflects the normal way Obsidian works, barring any anomaly.
I believe I understand what you are describing, but that does not explain the restart behavior. If the Workspace was saved with empty sidebars, quitting and reopening Obsidian should result in the same empty sidebars upon reopening. This is not the case. Obsidian reopens with same workspace, but the sidebars are populated.
That would be the anomaly I was referring to.
Is there something in your setup that would cause this behaviour? What is the folder you keep your Obsidian, what do you sync with…?
How do you close Obsidian? Do you force-close it?
We don’t know much yet.
Can you share the debug info from Help > Show Debug Info > Copy to Clipboard?
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.8.7
Installer version: v1.7.7
Operating system: Darwin Kernel Version 24.3.0: Thu Jan 2 20:24:16 PST 2025; root:xnu-11215.81.4~3/RELEASE_ARM64_T6000 24.3.0
Login status: logged in
Language: en
Catalyst license: insider
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: light
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 4
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 37
Plugins enabled: 24
1: Templater v2.9.3
2: Advanced URI v1.44.3
3: Block Reference Counter v0.4.3
4: Calendar v1.5.10
5: Copy document as HTML v0.8.1
6: Dataview v0.5.67
7: Drag-n-Drop for blocks v1.2.0
8: File Tree Alternative v2.6.0
9: Hover Editor v0.11.24
10: Jump-to-Date v1.0.18
11: List Modified v3.4.1
12: Natural Language Dates v0.6.2
13: No dupe leaves v0.0.12
14: Outliner v4.8.1
15: QuickAdd v1.11.5
16: Readwise Official v3.0.1
17: Review v1.6.6
18: Strange New Worlds v2.3.2
19: Tag Wrangler v0.6.1
20: Tasks v7.15.1
21: Text Transporter v1.0.12
22: Tracker v1.15.0
23: Omnisearch v1.26.0
24: Transfer LaTeX from GPT v1.0.1
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Custom theme and snippets: for cosmetic issues, please first try updating your theme and disabling your snippets. If still not fixed, please try to make the issue happen in the Sandbox Vault or disable community theme and snippets.
Community plugins: for bugs, please first try updating all your plugins to latest. If still not fixed, please try to make the issue happen in the Sandbox Vault or disable community plugins.
Working on MBP.
Close with cmd-Q.
Sync w/Obsidian sync.
Obsidian Vault is a separate folder in my Documents folder.
I’ve been cleaning up my workspaces, deleting old, seldom used spaces. All of the remaining workspaces seem to now behave as expected. However, there is one remaining workspace with the aberrant behavior. I wonder if there is something about the workspace itself, which was created some time ago, that is somehow buggy.
The best course of action would be to get rid of it then. Take a screenshot of it, if it contained some sidebar elements required for some workflow and make a new one.
Also, make sure you update the installer (by reinstalling on top of the old install), by downloading the dmg file from here:
As for your installed plugins, I don’t really know some of them.
No dupe leaves plugin may be one of those that could interfere with workspace elements…? Leave it on if you think what I advised above would still work.
Thank you for the recommendations. I will reinstall with the latest installer and hopefully wont see this behavior with new workspaces in the future.
