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.

▶ Watch the Glide Outline demo (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).

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.