Float Note

Float the note you are working on in a small window that stays on top of everything on your Mac. It stays visible when you switch Spaces, when another app goes full screen, and when you move between displays, like Tot's overlay but for a note in your vault.

Use it to keep a checklist, meeting notes or a scratchpad in view while you work in another app, and to type straight into it.

macOS only. Float Note needs window behaviour that only macOS has. On Windows and Linux its commands show a notice and do nothing.

Install

In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for Float Note, then select Install and Enable.

To install by hand, download main.js and manifest.json from the latest release, put them in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/float-note/, then reload Obsidian and enable Float Note under Settings → Community plugins.

Use

Open a note and run Float current note from the command palette. The note opens in the floating panel. Drag the panel by its top strip, and resize it from any edge. It reopens where you left it.

None of the commands has a default hotkey. To summon the panel quickly, assign one under Settings → Hotkeys.

Inside the panel, Cmd+E switches between Edit and View. Esc, Cmd+W or the × on the top strip close it.

Edit and View

Edit shows the note's Markdown source, with headings, bold, italic, code, links, quotes and frontmatter styled in your theme's colours. What you type is saved to the vault after a short pause. Changes made elsewhere, in the main editor, by another plugin or by sync, appear in the panel, unless the panel has unsaved edits of its own. Then the panel's version wins.

View shows the note as Obsidian renders it, with callouts, tables, images and your theme. It is read-only: links and checkboxes do nothing there.

There is no Live Preview. The panel is a separate window outside Obsidian's workspace, and Obsidian's editor cannot run in it.

Settings

• Opacity: how see-through the panel is, from 0.5 to 1.
• Debug log: off by default. When on, panel and view events are appended to debug.log in the plugin folder, to help diagnose problems.

Known limits

• Quitting Obsidian (Cmd+Q) while typing in the panel can lose up to about a second of text. Edits are saved after a short pause, and quitting cannot wait for a save.
• If the same note is edited in the panel and somewhere else within that second, the panel's version wins.
• View is read-only. Links and checkboxes do nothing, and content that other plugins draw slowly, such as Dataview or Tasks queries, may be missing.
• Obsidian's hotkeys only work while Obsidian is the frontmost app. To bring the panel up from inside another app, switch to Obsidian first.
• The panel does not reopen after Obsidian restarts.
• Tested on macOS 27 with Obsidian 1.14.4, installer 1.9.14 (Electron 37.6.0). The panel depends on Electron, which comes with the Obsidian installer, not with Obsidian's automatic updates. If the panel misbehaves, check Settings → General: when it shows an installer version older than 1.9.14, download the current installer from obsidian.md.

Files and privacy

Float Note makes no network requests and collects nothing.

It reads and writes only the note you float, and its own files in its plugin folder, .obsidian/plugins/float-note/:

• data.json: its settings and where the panel was last left.
• panel.html: the panel's page, a static file holding the editor. The panel is a separate window and has to load its page from a file. It contains no note content.
• With Debug log on, debug.log and last-view.html, the last note rendered in View.

Nothing is written outside your vault, and uninstalling the plugin removes all of these files.

Dependencies on Obsidian internals

Float Note relies on parts of Obsidian and Electron that are not public, stable plugin API, and any of them can change in an Obsidian update:

• require('electron').remote. Electron removed remote in v14. It works only because Obsidian provides @electron/remote in its place. Without it the plugin cannot create its window at all.
• Electron's type: 'panel' window. On macOS this is what lets the panel float over full-screen apps while Obsidian keeps its Dock icon. An ordinary window cannot do that.
• MarkdownRenderer.render is public API, but what View shows depends on what it produces. A few things are then patched in the copied output: callout icons, app:// image paths, and the contain: strict Obsidian puts on body.
• Obsidian's CSS class names (.markdown-source-view, .cm-strong, .cm-header-1, .cm-hmd-frontmatter and others). Edit's colours are measured from a hidden copy of Obsidian's editor markup, so it follows your theme, but only while those classes exist.

If an update breaks something, switch on Debug log, reproduce the problem and open an issue with the contents of debug.log. Check it first: it records panel, view and close events, and the note's file path.

How it works

Since macOS 10.14, an ordinary window cannot float over another app's full-screen Space, and Obsidian's popout windows are ordinary windows whose options a plugin cannot change. Float Note therefore creates its own window, through the @electron/remote module Obsidian exposes as require('electron').remote. The window is of Electron's type: 'panel', which is an NSPanel and the window type Tot uses, set to join every Space including full-screen ones, at the floating level.

The panel lives in Electron's main process, outside Obsidian's workspace, so the plugin owns its lifecycle. It saves before closing, closes with Obsidian's main window and when the plugin unloads, and destroys any panel left behind by a crash the next time it loads. The page is sandboxed with no Node access. The plugin talks to it with executeJavaScript and polls it for edits, so there is no callback to leak across a reload.

Building from source

npm install
npm run build

Copy main.js and manifest.json into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/float-note/, then reload Obsidian. Run npm run lint before committing.

Support

If Float Note is useful to you, you can buy me a coffee.

Licence

MIT.