Glide Outline

A fluid editor-margin outline for Obsidian with dock-style proximity magnification.

Glide Outline lives in the margin of your Markdown editor as a quiet column of heading markers. Move your pointer near the rail and the markers glide open into heading labels — the heading closest to your pointer magnifies the most, neighbours scale down continuously, like a vertical macOS Dock made of text.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/40130ca1-b9ce-4013-a5f2-bcc778a15e58

Download the original demo video (MP4, 7 MB)

Features

• Margin rail, not a panel. A thin column of markers on the left or right edge of the current Markdown editor. No card, no border, no toolbar.
• Marker length encodes level. H1 gets the longest marker, H6 the shortest. Line or dot style.
• Active heading highlight. The heading you are currently reading is tinted with your theme accent colour.
• Proximity reveal. Hover near the rail and labels slide out from the margin toward the text.
• Dock magnification. Cosine falloff scaling centred on the pointer, with gentle vertical displacement so magnified neighbours never overlap.
• Instant updates while typing. Headings are parsed live from the editor on every change, then corrected by Obsidian's metadata cache.
• Accurate click-to-jump. Works in Source Mode, Live Preview and Reading Mode — including duplicate headings — without reopening the file.
• Non-blocking by design. Every drawing layer is pointer-transparent; only the thin marker rail and the actually visible label cards intercept clicks. The editor underneath stays fully interactive.
• Narrow-pane aware. In split layouts the rail measures its pane and shrinks labels so magnified text never clips; extremely narrow panes fall back to markers-only compact mode.
• Customisable label cards. Background opacity, border, corner radius, shadow, padding and text shadow — down to a pure-text mode with no chrome at all.
• Optional Markdown labels. Render inline formatting (bold, code, links…) inside heading labels, powered by Obsidian's own renderer.
• Pop-out window safe. All DOM checks use the owning window, so the rail works in detached editor windows.
• Accessible. Keyboard focus keeps the outline open, Enter/Space activation, and hidden labels provide screen-reader names without Obsidian's hover tooltips.

Installation

Community plugins

1. Open Settings → Community plugins in Obsidian.
2. Select Browse and search for Glide Outline.
3. Select Install, then Enable.

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from a release.
2. Copy them to <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/glide-outline/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Glide Outline in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

pnpm install
pnpm run dev     # watch build
pnpm run build   # type-check + production build
pnpm run lint
pnpm test

Symlink (or copy) the repository into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/glide-outline/ for live testing.

Manual stress test

tests/fixtures/glide-outline-stress-test.md is a real, readable manual with 120+ headings designed to break outlines. Copy it into a test vault and walk through this checklist:

1. Overflow & edge fades — the outline must overflow any laptop viewport; the top/bottom fades appear only on the edges that hide more content and follow every scroll.
2. Edge auto-scroll — park the pointer in the lower fifth of the rail: scrolling starts softly after a short dwell and speeds up toward the edge. Hold the mouse button: scrolling pauses; release: it resumes. 2b. Pointer-follow pre-scroll — flick the pointer quickly downward from the middle of the list: the list pre-scrolls to meet the gesture with no dwell; slow browsing movements never trigger it. 2c. Wheel — with the pointer over the outline, the wheel scrolls the outline (not the editor); at a dead end the wheel passes through to the editor. A wheel action pauses both automatic mechanisms briefly.
3. Level badges — the H1–H6 badges align in one column on the rail-facing card edge; 附录 L's eight consecutive H3 cards must line up perfectly; 附录 M jumps H2 → H5 with no intermediate badge.
4. Magnification at the extremes — the very long first and last titles must stay fully visible at peak scale, never clipped by the pane edges.
5. Long tokens — the space-less Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious… heading gets a single-line ellipsis; long English titles with spaces do too.
6. Duplicates — three identical 常见问题 H3s and the two-level 监控 pair all highlight and jump independently.
7. Code fences — none of the fake # headings inside fenced blocks appear in the rail.
8. Narrow pane — drag the split narrow: cards shrink text budget first, badges and paddings last; nothing overlaps the editor text.

Structural properties of the fixture are pinned by tests/stress-fixture.test.ts, so edits cannot silently destroy this coverage.

Settings

Settings are grouped into General, Appearance, Motion and Advanced tabs, plus a one-click Restore default appearance button (position, shown levels and Markdown rendering are preserved).

Setting	Default	Description
Enable outline	on	Master switch.
Position	right	Which editor margin the rail sits in.
Horizontal offset	12 px	Leave space between the outline and the editor edge.
Vertical offset	0 px	Shift the rail up/down.
Marker style	line	line or dot markers.
Maximum magnification	1.25	Peak scale of the label nearest the pointer.
Magnification radius	90 px	Distance over which magnification decays to 1.
Base font size	12 px	Label font size before magnification.
Maximum label width	240 px	Longer headings get a single-line ellipsis.
Background opacity	78 %	Label card background; 0 turns cards into pure text.
Border / Shadow	off	Optional card chrome.
Level badge	on	H1–H6 badge on the rail-facing edge of each card.
Corner radius	4 px	Card corner rounding.
Horizontal / vertical padding	7 / 1 px	Card padding.
Render Markdown in labels	off	Show inline bold/code/links in labels.
Show heading levels	H1–H6	Filter which levels appear in the rail.
Pointer edge auto-scroll	on	Scroll the list when the pointer dwells near a list edge.
Pointer movement assist	on	Pre-scroll toward quick vertical pointer movement.
Edge auto-scroll speed	1	Speed multiplier for pointer edge auto-scroll.
Pointer movement assist strength	1	Strength of pointer-follow pre-scroll.
Auto-scroll trigger area	120 px	Height of the edge zone that starts auto-scroll.

Slider changes apply instantly but are saved to disk with a short debounce, so dragging never hammers the settings file.

The four scrolling mechanisms

The outline viewport can scroll for four independent reasons; they are deliberately separate mechanisms with separate rules:

1. Active-heading follow — while the pointer is outside the outline, the rail quietly keeps the active heading in view. Paused the moment your pointer enters the outline.
2. Edge auto-scroll — pointer dwelling near the top/bottom edge scrolls the list; a short dwell, a latch and hysteresis prevent accidental triggering while browsing headings near an edge.
3. Pointer-follow pre-scroll — a fast, decisive vertical pointer movement anywhere in the list pre-scrolls it in the same direction (no dwell — the gesture itself is the intent). Capped below the edge mechanism's speed; toggleable via Pointer-follow pre-scroll.
4. Manual wheel — the wheel always wins: wheeling over the outline scrolls it directly and pauses mechanisms 2 and 3 for a short cooldown, so the outline never fights your hand. Wheeling past a dead end, over a non-overflowing outline, or with Ctrl/⌘ held passes through to the editor untouched.

Commands

• Toggle outline — show or hide the rail.
• Move outline to opposite side — flip between the left and right margin.

Why an editor-margin outline?

Sidebar TOC panels cost horizontal space permanently and live far away from the text you are reading. Glide Outline keeps orientation information inside the editor's margin: nearly invisible while you write, instantly explorable when you reach for it. It follows the active Markdown pane — in split layouts it belongs to the editor, not to the app window.

Current limitations

• Only the active Markdown pane gets a rail (first version by design).
• Desktop only (isDesktopOnly: true); no touch/hover emulation on mobile.
• Setext headings (=== / ---) are supported by the live parser in common cases, but exotic Markdown edge cases defer to Obsidian's metadata cache.
• In Reading Mode, headings far outside the rendered viewport may be virtualized by Obsidian; jumping falls back to Obsidian's own scroll state in that case.

License

MIT — implemented independently; no source code was copied from other plugins.