I tried this plugin out for the first time today. It’s very promising but has rough edges that will need to be smoothed out before it can be submitted.
While not visually the same, this might get at what you all want to do.
It allows creating or navigating from a note up, down, left, and right to another note. The local graph view provides navigation assistance.
I’m sorry to say that recent updates to Obsidian have broken the plugin. I don’t have any time at the moment to fix it and with the ongoing invasion of Ukraine I don’t think we can expect updates from Artem for now. Sorry for the bad news
This plugin or something that allows for easier transitioning from permanent notes to long form is absolutely a must. People who talk about Zettelkasten inspired software, usually overlook the fact that the software called Zettelkasten (which Ahrens recommended back in 2017 in his “How to take smart notes”) has this feature: Namely, the software has a kind of writing module for you to group your Zettels into paragraphs, subsections, sections, chapters, parts, etc. In that regard, the software tries to emulate the fact that Luhmann himself took out and organized his own Zettels in different ways to construct meaningful structures that would then become long form entities (paragraphs, subsections, sections, etc).
Obsidian and other Zettelkasten software, as they currently exist, are perfect for discovering and producing new ideas, but for those of us who intend to write long form (essays, books, articles, etc.), a plugin/module for putting together and playing around with Zettels is needed. As others have mentioned, the Kanban plugin is a great source of inspiration for what this plugin/module could look like in the future.
I’m looking into using excalidraw plugin for putting my zettles together. You can just drag the note into canvas and it shows a visual of that note on the canvas where you can even edit it. But I see how you can do the same thing with kanban too
I’d suggest that everyone check out the way Workflowy (free) can instantly switch between an outline and a kanban view. It’s very effective. In principle, i can’t see any reason why a switch of view like this couldn’t be implemented in Obsidian. I suspect it would need a small database (eg json) to work smoothly.