Window Spaces

💡 The Philosophy: Free Your Main Workspace

Obsidian’s vibrant plugin ecosystem and flexible layouts make it the ultimate "Everything Notebook". But as our vaults grow, so does the clutter:

• 🗂️ The Overcrowded Main Window: Canvas whiteboards, Excalidraw sketches, Dataview dashboards, graph views, and complex note splits all compete for the exact same screen real estate.
• ⚡ Context Switching Overhead: Switching between project management, deep literature research, and daily task review constantly disrupts your open tabs, sidebars, and pane splits.
• 🖥️ Underutilized Multi-Monitors: Modern workstations feature multiple displays, yet managing distinct, persistent layouts across separate windows is difficult.

Window Spaces is an organic, seamless extension of Obsidian. Instead of cramming everything into a single main window, Window Spaces lets you isolate distinct workflows into dedicated Popout Work Cabins (Spaces).

With focus interception technology, popout activity bar engines, and per-window layout lifecycle management, your heavy plugins, complex splits, and research setups effortlessly transition into independent windows — letting you focus on one task at a time with zero clutter.

⚖️ Obsidian Core Workspaces vs. Window Spaces

🖼️ Visual Showcase

🗺️ Quartz Studio Work Cabin	📁 Folder-Scoped Project Cabin
Emerald-accented popout with Canvas, architecture notes, and a live status badge	Folder Space Explorer keeps the Apollo project tree focused inside its own cabin

🧭 Popout Activity Bar	🛡️ Dual Layout Guardrails
Native-style activity bar and view context menu in a dedicated popout	Three-column layout preserved: central last tab becomes New Tab while the sidebar shows its protection Notice

⚙️ Activity Bar Settings	🎨 Space Appearance
Drag-to-reorder controls and one-click import from the main window	Name, icon, accent color, and live preview for a distinctive Space identity

🧩 Unified Panels & Switcher
Folder Space Explorer on the left, Window Spaces panels in the center and right, plus a seven-space Project / Research / Writing switcher

🧩 Sidebar Switcher
The same panel docked in the main window's right sidebar: keyboard-driven switching across Project / Research / Writing sections

✨ Key Features & Recent Highlights

🪟 1. Popout Activity Bar & Sidebar Engine (New in v1.1+)

Obsidian popout windows natively lack sidebars. Window Spaces injects a true, native-like Activity Bar & Collapsible Sidebar engine directly into popout windows:

• Collapsible Sidebars: Toggle left/right sidebars using native-styled toolbar buttons or customizable hotkeys.
• Right-Click Context Menu: Right-click directly on any Activity Bar icon to toggle view visibility, switch sidebars, or hide/show the activity bar and sidebar.
• Dynamic View Discovery & Prewarming: Embed File Explorer, Bookmarks, Search, Outline, or third-party views directly in popouts. Add view includes registered and already-open views, using their display names when available.
• Ultra-Smooth Sidebar Resizing: Uses exact borderBoxSize measurements with a 1px change-threshold guard to eliminate sidebar jitter, bounce-back, and slow border shrinkage.
• Drag-to-Reorder & One-Click Import in Settings: Rearrange popout activity bar buttons with intuitive drag-and-drop, and import your current main window sidebar layout with a single click; resetting settings safely preserves your saved spaces.

🚀 2. Folder Spaces Synergy: Scoped Project Cabins

Pair Window Spaces with Folder Spaces to achieve Double Context Isolation:

• Window Isolation: Window Spaces isolates the window lifecycle, multi-monitor position, popout activity bars, and accent frame themes.
• Filesystem Scoping: Dock a Folder Space Explorer in the popout sidebar, locking the visible file tree strictly to a specific project subfolder (e.g. Projects/Apollo/).
• Smart Leaf Routing: Clicking any file inside the scoped explorer routes directly into the popout's central editor without disturbing the sidebar structure.
• Micro-Vault Experience: Work in an isolated project cabin with zero visual clutter from the rest of your vault.

🎨 3. Visual Identity & Accent Window Frames (New in v1.1+)

Never lose track of your open cabins across multiple displays:

• 4-Side Perimeter Accent Frame: Highlights the window border with your Space's theme color (automatically hides when maximized for a seamless edge-to-edge view).
• Custom Logos & Corner Folds: Assign any Emoji or Lucide icon, paired with folded corner accents.
• Status Bar Badge: Displays the active space name and quick-save status at the bottom of the popout.
• Atmospheric Accents: Subtle theme glows on pane splitters and soft background tints on activity bars.

🎯 4. Popout Routing & Dual Layout Guardrails (New in v1.2+)

Obsidian's architecture is natively designed around a single main window. Views opened from a popout window — and notes opened from a popout's own sidebar — frequently land in the main window, steal focus, or overwrite each other, because Obsidian resolves those requests globally. Window Spaces routes them to the window that made them, paired with comprehensive layout collapse defenses:

• Multi-Instance Concurrency for Core & Community Views: Breaks Obsidian's singleton limitations. Native core views (Outline, Backlinks, Tags, Search, Bookmarks) and community plugin views (e.g. Grid Explorer, Notebook Navigator) can now co-exist as multiple independent instances across different windows simultaneously without stealing focus or colliding. Use the popout's activity bar or Add view to open a local instance of a view that is already open elsewhere.
• Global Discovery with Explicit Popout Routing: getLeavesOfType() keeps Obsidian's global results and ordering, and getLeftLeaf() / getRightLeaf() stay native so background plugin initialization keeps its main-sidebar destination. While a managed popout is focused, explicit getLeaf("left"/"right") / ensureSideLeaf() requests still select or create local sidebar leaves, and file opens from its sidebar target the editor area. Commands that reuse the first globally discovered leaf may still focus another window; use the popout's activity bar for an explicit local view. Turning off Route views to their popout windows restores native routing without disabling per-window note context. This switch cannot stop another plugin that performs the same kind of routing (for example Folder Spaces); such a plugin has to be disabled, or asked for an equivalent switch.
• Per-Window Event Gating & Active File Tracking: Intercepts file-open event broadcasts and workspace.getActiveFile(). An Outline in Window A strictly tracks the note active in Window A, while an Outline in Window B tracks Window B — completely eliminating cross-window context bleeding. During tab switches the live active note takes priority over the cached note, and the cache keeps a window's note context while a sidebar or another window holds focus.
• Dynamic View Discovery in Add view: Add view lists registered views and already-open views, using a view's own display name when it only exposes one on its live instance (e.g. MAKE.md Navigator), instead of a prettified view type id.
• Saved Tab Restoration: Restores each tab's saved view type and state in its intended window as the layout is built. This preserves tabs when navigation plugins remove empty panes or redirect duplicate file opens, while native file loading remains in control of deferred file views.
• Dual Layout Collapse Guardrails:
  • In-Place New Tab Conversion: When closing the last remaining tab in the central content area, Window Spaces intercepts detach and converts the view in-place into an Obsidian native New Tab (empty view), preventing container destruction and split collapse.
  • Sidebar Tab Protection: Attempting to close the sole remaining tab in a popout sidebar is cleanly blocked with a native notice ("The last tab in the sidebar cannot be closed"), safeguarding the sidebar container.
• Non-Navigable & Pinned Tab Safe Routing: When the active center leaf contains a non-navigable view (e.g., Outline, Canvas, Graph) or a pinned tab, clicking a file from the sidebar automatically opens a new tab in the central area rather than failing navigation or overwriting the view.
• Layout Structure Guardrails: Drop boundaries prevent tabs from accidentally breaking activity bars; missing or renamed files are safely held by native empty tab placeholders.

⚡ 5. Zero-Flicker Restore & Multi-Monitor Geometry (New in v1.2+)

• Target-Only Reconcile: Restoring or updating a space only updates the target window without jittering or flickering other open windows.
• Geometry Pre-positioning: Remembers exact window coordinates and sizes across multiple monitors.
• Off-Screen Guard: Automatically recalculates coordinates if an external monitor was disconnected.
• Startup Auto-Matching: Automatically detects and re-links existing popout windows upon Obsidian restart.

🔄 6. Per-Space Auto-Save

• Effortless Synchronization: Toggle 🔄 Auto-save on any Space. Modifications made during your work session are automatically saved in the background with a 5-second debounce and an instant snapshot on window close.
• Template Safety: Keep auto-save disabled on standard template spaces to prevent accidental layout drift.

🗂️ 7. Unified 3-in-1 Interface & Section Groups

• Flexible Mount Points: Access your Spaces seamlessly from the Left/Right Sidebar, as an Editor Tab, or via the Quick-Popup Modal (Ribbon Icon or Hotkeys).
• Section Groups & Archiving: Organize your spaces into collapsible sections, drag to reorder, and archive inactive spaces (📦 Archived).
• Hover Content Preview: Hover over any Space to instantly preview its included files, active tab, and pinned document structure.

🧭 8. Per-Entry-Point Popout Behavior

Window Spaces decides, for each way a window can be opened, how much it should take over. Both switches live under Settings → Window Spaces → New Popout Defaults:

• Native popout window behavior: applies to popouts opened by Obsidian's own commands (Move to new window, the tab context menu), and to popouts another plugin opens for you (for example Folder Spaces → Open in new window). Status bar only (default) keeps a plain single-column popout with just the status bar, so you can save it as a Space whenever you want; Full builds the complete three-column layout with both activity bars; Disabled leaves the window untouched.
• URL & web popout behavior: applies to popouts displaying a URL, such as OpenID/OAuth login redirects and web viewers. Disabled (default) keeps them completely native; Status bar only and Full opt into the same two levels when you want Window Spaces present in web windows too.
• Show space status bar stays a global switch: turning it off removes the status bar from every popout, regardless of the two policies above.
• Spaces created by the Window Spaces switcher always restore in full, whatever these settings say.

🚀 Typical Space Workflows

📥 Installation

From Obsidian Community Plugins (Recommended)

1. Open Obsidian Settings > Community plugins.
2. Turn off Restricted mode and click Browse.
3. Search for Window Spaces.
4. Click Install, then click Enable.

Manual Installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest GitHub Release.
2. Create a folder named window-spaces inside your vault: <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/window-spaces/.
3. Move the downloaded files into this folder.
4. Reload Obsidian and enable Window Spaces under Community plugins.

🛠️ Quick Start Guide

1. Save Your First Space

1. Open a new popout window (Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + N or drag any tab out).
2. Arrange your split panes (e.g. Canvas on the left, notes on the right, or a sidebar view).
3. Open the Command Palette (Ctrl/Cmd + P) and run Window Spaces: Save current Space.
4. Set a name, assign an icon/emoji, choose an accent border color, and optionally enable auto-save.

2. Restore and Manage Spaces

• Open the Spaces panel from the Ribbon Icon, the sidebar, or run Window Spaces: Open as popup window.
• Click or Enter: Instantly launches the Space in a fresh popout window.
• Shift + Click or Shift + Enter: Restores the layout directly into the current window.
• Click the dropdown menu (... or right-click) to toggle Auto-save 🔄, rename, edit, or delete.

⌨️ Shortcuts & Hotkeys

🤝 Ecosystem Synergy & Heavy Plugins

Window Spaces harmonizes beautifully with heavy and canvas-like community plugins. For detailed integration patterns with Excalidraw, Excalibrain, Canvas, Dataview, and Notebook Navigator, check out our community guide:

📖 Full User Guide & Plugin Synergy Walkthrough

💻 System Compatibility

• Obsidian Version: v1.13.0 or newer
• Platform: Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux)
• License: MIT License