Desk Sidebar

A pane in the sidebar where you can put notes temporarily while you are writing in your current note of focus.

Usage

Open the pane with the ribbon icon or the Desk Sidebar: Open pane command, then:

• Move a tab onto the desk — drag a note's tab from the editor area into the pane. The tab closes and the note joins the list where you drop it. Dropping onto the sidebar's tab icons still docks the tab in the sidebar, as usual.
• Move a note back into the editor — drag a note out of the pane into the editor area. It opens as its own tab in the tab group you drop it on, and leaves the desk.
• Add a note without closing anything — drag it from the File Explorer, drag link text into the pane, or run Desk Sidebar: Add current note.
• Add a note from its context menu — right-click a note in the File Explorer, its tab, a link to it, or the graph and select Add to desk, beside Open in new window. The note goes to the top of the desk and stays open wherever it was; selecting several notes in the File Explorer adds them all. Notes already on the desk don't show the entry, so it never reorders the desk.
• Reorder — drag a note's title row up or down within the pane.
• Remove — hover a note and select its × button, or right-click it and select Remove from desk.
• Fold and unfold — select a note's title to collapse it to its title, or expand it to read a preview. A card grows with its preview up to the Maximum card height setting; longer previews scroll inside it.
• Resize a card — drag its bottom edge up or down. A card never grows past its note or the Maximum card height setting. It keeps the height you drag it to, also while it's folded, filtered, or grouped; drag it all the way open, or right-click it and select Reset height, to fit it to its note again.
• Open a note — right-click it and select Open note, or drag it into the editor area.
• Collapse all, expand all, clear the desk — use the buttons at the top of the pane. Clearing asks first, and only takes the notes off the desk; they stay in your vault.
• Filter the desk — select the search button at the top of the pane and type. Only notes whose title or text contains what you typed stay visible (case doesn't matter). Select the button again to hide the field and show every note.
• Color a note — hover a note and select the dot next to its × to pick one of your theme's named colors, or No color.
• Group by color — select the group button at the top of the pane, or run Desk Sidebar: Toggle grouping by color, to sort the notes into one block per color under headers. Notes without a color come last. Changing a note's color while grouped moves it to its new block; dragging a note out of its block ends the grouping. Select the button again to remove the headers and keep the order.
• Filter by color — select the palette button at the top of the pane to list the colors in use with their note counts. Select colors to show only their notes; this combines with the search filter. Select a color's × to take that color off all its notes, or Remove all colors to clear every color. Select the palette button again to hide the list and show every note.

The list, its fold states, card heights, colors, and grouping persist across restarts.

Settings

• Add new notes folded — whether a note arrives showing only its title, or already unfolded.
• Maximum card height — how tall a card may grow, as a share of the pane's height, from 20% to 100% (50% by default). Open panes follow the slider as you move it.

A CSS snippet still overrides the setting, if you want a cap in other units: .desk-view { --desk-card-max-height: 400px; }.

Known limitations

• Drag and drop needs a mouse or trackpad, so it does nothing on touch screens. The commands and the right-click menu (Open note, Move up, Move down, Remove from desk) cover the same ground.
• Moving tabs onto the desk relies on parts of Obsidian that aren't part of its plugin API, so an Obsidian update could break it until Desk Sidebar is updated. When that happens, tabs dropped on the pane dock in the sidebar again; everything else keeps working.
• Only Markdown notes can be put on the desk.
• Previews are read-only, and are rendered when a note is unfolded — edit the note by opening it.

Development

This project follows the conventions described in AGENTS.md — read that first.

• Node.js 18+ and npm.
• npm install — install dependencies.
• npm run dev — build in watch mode.
• npm run build — type-check and produce a production main.js.
• npm run lint — lint with eslint-plugin-obsidianmd's recommended rules.

Testing in Obsidian

Copy or symlink this repo into <Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/desk-sidebar/, then enable Desk Sidebar under Settings → Community plugins in that vault.

If your Obsidian install is sandboxed (Flatpak, Snap), a symlink outside the sandbox's exposed filesystem may not resolve. For Flatpak, check flatpak info --show-permissions md.obsidian.Obsidian for its filesystems= entry, and either widen it (flatpak override --user --filesystem=home md.obsidian.Obsidian) or copy the built files into the vault instead of symlinking.

Releasing

See the "Versioning & releases" section in AGENTS.md.