pane-relief

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Pane Relief: Pane History and Management for Obsidian

This plugin helps relieve the "pane" of managing lots of panes in Obsidian.md (especially when using the keyboard), by providing features such as:

• Browser-like per-pane navigation history (complete with forward/back lists)
• Commands to move between panes or windows, move panes around, jump to the Nth pane, etc.
• An intelligent pane maximizing command
• Optional per-pane navigation buttons and pane numbering
• Focus lock for Obsidian 0.15.6+, to stop sidebar panes stealing focus
• A browser-style "close" command that activates an adjacent pane instead of the most-recently used one
• A Simple Sliding Panes mode that can be toggled per-window and is compatible with Obsidian 0.16 (NEW in 0.3.0)

The overall goal of these features is to provide a more browser-like Obsidian experience for users that like using lots of panes, windows, and/or Hover Editors.

(Note: this plugin adds a lot of preconfigured hotkeys. You may want to install the Hotkey Helper plugin first, so you can easily see and resolve any conflicts, update the keys to better suit your preferences, and assign hotkeys for the commands that don't have a default.)

Per-Pane Navigation History

Normally, Obsidian keeps a single global history for back/forward navigation commands. This history includes not just how you navigate within each pane, but also your navigation between panes. (Which produces counterintuitive results at times, especially if you've pinned any panes in place, causing new, additional panes to be split off when you go "back" or "forward"!)

Pane Relief fixes these problems by giving each pane its own unique back/forward history, just like the tabs in a browser. Going back or forward affects only that pane, and no other. If a pane is pinned, a notice is displayed telling you to unpin if you want to go forward or back, instead of opening a new pane. (Messages are also displayed if you try to go further "back" or "forward" than existing history for the pane.)

In addition, Pane Relief captures the fourth and fifth mouse buttons ("back" and "forward") and applies the navigation to the pane (if any) where the mouse was pointing when those buttons were clicked.

Plus, Pane Relief augments the Obsidian forward/back buttons found in the titlebar, giving them counts to show how far "back" or "forward" you can go in the current pane. And, as in a normal browser, you can right-click those arrows to show a list of pages you can click to directly navigate to, without losing your history position.

The pages shown in the list can be:

• Previewed for quick reference (by holding Ctrl or Cmd while hovering),
• Dragged from the menu and dropped elsewhere to create a link or move the file
• Clicked to navigate to that position in history (without losing your place),
• Ctrl/Cmd clicked to open a new pane with duplicated history at that point in the navigation (similar to doing the same thing in Chrome or Firefox)
• Right-clicked to open a file context menu to perform actions directly on the file

Last, but far from least, Pane Relief saves each pane's history not only across Obsidian restarts, but also saves and loads the history along with workspace layouts, so if you're using the Obsidian workspaces plugin, your navigation history will not get confused by switching between workspaces. (And it even works with Obsidian 0.15.3+'s multiple desktop windows feature.)

Pane Access and Movement Commands

Also similar to browser tabs, Pane Relief provides some keyboard commands for jumping to specific panes and reshuffling them. Ctrl/Cmd+PageUp and PageDown cycle between panes, while adding Shift swaps the panes themselves (as in Firefox). Alt+1 through Alt+8 jump to that numbered pane in the workspace, and Alt+9 jumps to the last pane. Adding Ctrl/Cmd moves the panes to the specified position, instead.

With these commands, you no longer need extreme dexterity to reposition panes when using the Sliding Panes plugin: you can simply bump them up or down in the order, or assign them to a specific spot. And with the numbered positions, you can easily reserve certain panes for specific documents you always need open, and then use the relevant hotkeys to jump directly to them.

To see the full list of commands and view or change their key assignments, visit the Hotkeys section of the Obsidian settings, and then type "pane relief" into the search box.

New in 0.1.2: There are now commands for navigating between popout windows in Obsidian 0.15.3+, and you can also configure hotkeys to jump to the Nth window. These commands do not have hotkeys assigned by default, however: you must manually define your own.

Maximize Active Pane

As of version 0.1.6, Pane Relief also includes a "Maximize Active Pane" command that is compatible with the Hover Editor plugin and the popout windows of Obsidian 0.15.3+. If you were previously using the "Maximize Active Pane" plugin, you may wish to switch to disable that plugin and assign the hotkey to Pane Relief's version instead.

Simple Sliding Panes Mode

As of version 0.3.0, Pane Relief includes a "Toggle sliding panes" command that lets you make each window's workspace horizontally scrollable with fixed-width panes, instead of a limited width divided between them. This is similar to, but more limited than the "classic" Sliding Panes plugin, as it does not support variable-width panes, pane stacking, or header rotation. But on the other hand, it works with Obsidian 0.16 and can be toggled on a per-window and per-workspace basis. (The state is saved across Obsidian restarts and workspace save/load.)

By default, panes will be 700px wide, but if you use the Style Settings plugin you can configure the width to any CSS value.

Please note that if you are migrating from the standalone Sliding Panes plugin, you must both disable it (not just turn off sliding panes!) and restart Obsidian before trying to use Pane Relief's sliding panes. This is because the Sliding Panes plugin does not properly uninstall all of its hooks when disabled, and it will interfere with Pane Relief's sliding panes if left active.

Focus Lock

As of version 0.2.1, Pane Relief allows you to block sidebar panes from receiving focus (and thereby stealing keystrokes or opening links in the wrong pane(s)), using its focus lock function. If you are on Obsidian 0.15.6 or above, a clickable lock symbol appears in the status bar, and a keyboard command is also available to toggle the feature on and off (in case you want to edit a note in your sidebar, use keyboard navigation in the file explorer, etc.)

The toggle's current state is saved with your workspace, so it persists across Obsidian restarts, and if you're using Workspaces or Workspaces Plus, each workspace can have a different state. (Focus lock will default to "off" in new workspaces, so if you want it on in your current workspaces you will have to turn it on in each one the first time.)

Installation

To install the plugin, open Pane Relief in Obsidian's Community Plugins browser, then select "Install" and "Enable".

Once enabled, Pane Relief will take over managing history, but will not use or erase Obsidian's builtin history. Disabling Pane Relief will re-enable the builtin history, but then Pane Relief's own history may be lost if you don't re-enable the plugin before you exit or load a new workspace. (This is because Pane Relief has to be enabled in order for it to save or load the history when a workspace is saved or loaded.)

If you encounter any problems with the plugin, please file bug reports to this repository rather than using the Obsidian forums: I don't check the forums every day (or even every week!) but I do receive email notices from Github and will get back to you much faster than I will see forum comments.

Styling And Integration

Style Settings

Two commonly requested style features are 1) disabling history counts in the titlebar, and 2) adding numbers to panes. These options are now available via the Style Settings plugin -- just install it and go to its settings: there will be toggles for "Disable history counts" and "Number panes".

Centralized Pane Lists

Two other plugins that work well with Pane Relief for navigating between panes are Quick Switcher++ and Koncham Workspace. Quick Switcher++ lets you assign a hotkey to pop up a list of open notes and jump directly to the pane (even across multiple windows or hover editors), and Koncham Workspace lets you have a sidebar pane listing the contents of all your main window's center area panes and hover editors (that you can click to jump to).

Per-pane Navigation Buttons

If you'd like to have each pane get its own back/forward buttons with all of Pane Relief's features available, you can install the Custom Page Headers and Title Bar Buttons plugin, enable it, and then configure it as follows:

1. Turn on "Show buttons on desktop"
2. Turn on "Pane Relief count" (optional)
3. Add buttons for "Navigate back" and "Navigate Forward"

Each pane header will then have a back and forward button with counts, titles, and right-click menus with draggable and right-clickable history entries.

Styling Maximized Panes

Pane Relief uses slightly different CSS classes from the Maximize Active Pane plugin; if you want to e.g. show a border on a maximized work area, the relevant classes are:

• .should-maximize appears on the outermost workspace split that contains a maximized pane
• .has-maximized appears on every workspace split containing a maximized pane (recursively)
• .is-maximized appears on workspace leaves that are maximized

Note: these classes don't apply to hover editors with just a single pane, but if you split a hover editor into multiple panes and maximize one, they will apply within that hover editor.

Pane Numbering

If you install the Style Settings plugin, you can turn on pane numbering in its options page. But for custom theming and CSS snippets that may want to show pane shortcut position numbers, Pane Relief adds a class (.has-pane-relief-label) and a variable (--pane-relief-label) to the first 8 (and last) workspace leaves. The variable gives a number that can be used with counter-reset and content to label the panes using appropriate CSS. Here's a short CSS snippet that puts the numbers in the pane headers, and works reasonably well with the Sliding Panes plugin:

/* Number panes in their headers */
.workspace-split.mod-root .workspace-leaf .view-header-icon::before {
    content: "";
    display: inline-flex;
    position: relative;
    bottom: 3px;
    min-inline-size: 1em;
}

.workspace-split.mod-root .workspace-leaf.has-pane-relief-label .view-header-icon::before {
    counter-reset: pane-number var(--pane-relief-label);
    content: counter(pane-number);
}

Known Issues/Current Limitations

Linked Panes

The history management doesn't have any special handling for linked panes, and so may produce counterintuitive results. For example, going "back" in one pane may cause linked panes to treat that movement as if it were "forward", in the sense of adding the back target as a new history entry. This may or may not be better than what Obsidian's built-in history does, but I'm open to feedback or suggestions for better ways to handle things. (Especially if they can actually be implemented, technically speaking.)

Renames and Deletes

If you rename or delete a note that's in the history for a pane, then going backward or forward to that point may not find the file, and will give you a "No file open" message instead.