Workspace++

Workspace++ is an Obsidian community plugin for saving, switching, and organizing workspace sessions. It is built for people who want Obsidian layouts to feel fast, native, and keyboard-friendly.

Highlights

• Save the current workspace layout as a named session.
• Switch sessions from the status bar, quick switcher, command palette, hotkeys, or session manager.
• Use automatic save-on-switch, or turn it off for a manual save workflow.
• Organize sessions into groups.
• Customize status bar click, middle-click, right-click, and modified-click actions.
• Scroll on the status bar to switch sessions.
• See a status bar warning when a manual-save session has unsaved layout changes.
• Save, reload, duplicate, rename, delete, reorder, and bulk-delete sessions.
• Keep per-session version history and restore previous layouts.
• Export, import, and restore session backups.
• Load sessions from note frontmatter with workspace-session.
• Save the current note name as a session and write the matching frontmatter automatically.
• Use Workspace++ in 21 interface locales.

Features

Quick switching

Cycle through sessions with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Enter, or move backward/forward with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+, and Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+.. You can also register numbered or name-based session switch commands for custom hotkeys.

Session manager

Open the session manager to switch, create, rename, duplicate, delete, reorder, bulk-delete, and group sessions.

Create, duplicate, delete

Create sessions from the current layout, duplicate the active session with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+M, or delete it with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Backspace.

Rename and reorder

Rename the current session with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+R, right-click sessions for context actions, and drag sessions to reorder them.

Status bar workflow

The status bar shows the active group and session. By default, click opens the quick switcher, Cmd/Ctrl+Click saves the current session, right-click opens the session menu, and Cmd/Ctrl+Right-click restores the latest version history entry.

You can customize status bar click actions in settings, including save, save as, reload without saving, rename, duplicate, previous/next session, blank session, version history, and "save current note name as session".

Save modes

Workspace++ defaults to automatic save-on-switch. If you prefer a manual workflow, turn auto-save off and use explicit save/reload commands. In manual mode, Workspace++ can warn before switching away from unsaved layout changes and highlight the status bar when the current layout differs from the saved session.

Manual-save tools include:

• Save current session.
• Save current session as a new session.
• Save the current layout to another existing session.
• Reload the current session without saving local layout changes.

Session groups

Groups let you organize sessions without deleting or duplicating them. You can switch groups, show all sessions, move sessions between groups, remove sessions from groups, and disable the group feature if you do not need it.

Version history and backups

Workspace++ keeps per-session version history for layout changes and can restore previous layouts. It also keeps session backup files in the vault and supports manual export/import snapshots from settings or commands.

Automatic rotation backups are created on save, hourly, up to 3 generations.

Frontmatter sessions

Add this property to a note to load a session when that note is opened:

workspace-session: My Session

Workspace++ also provides a command, Save current note name as session, that writes workspace-session: <note-name> to the current Markdown note and creates or overwrites the matching session using the current layout.

Local settings

Workspace++ can keep settings local to the current vault, while session data remains in the vault-level Workspace++ storage folder. This is useful when syncing .obsidian settings across vaults but keeping Workspace++ behavior different per vault.

Installation

From Community Plugins

1. Open Obsidian Settings > Community plugins.
2. Click Browse and search for Workspace++.
3. Click Install, then Enable.

Community plugin page:

https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/workspace-plus-plus

From release

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Create a folder at <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/workspace-plus-plus/.
3. Place the three files into that folder.
4. Open Obsidian Settings > Community plugins and enable Workspace++.

With BRAT

Use BRAT if you want to test unreleased changes directly from GitHub.

1. Install the BRAT plugin.
2. Open Settings > BRAT > Add Beta plugin.
3. Paste this URL and click Add Plugin:

https://github.com/s1m4ne/obsidian-workspace-plus

Commands

All commands can be assigned custom hotkeys in Settings > Hotkeys.

Sync and storage

Workspace++ stores session data in your vault:

.workspace-plus-plus/sessions.json

The immediate backup is stored at:

.workspace-plus-plus/sessions.backup.json

Rotation backups are stored in:

.workspace-plus-plus/backups/

This makes sessions easy to sync with file-based tools, but concurrent edits are not automatically merged. If you use Syncthing, Dropbox, iCloud, Obsidian Sync, or another file sync tool, let sync finish before editing sessions on another device. Automatic backups help recover from corrupted session data, but they are not a full multi-device conflict resolver.

Languages

Workspace++ includes 21 interface locales:

English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Video Demos

Community

Bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests are welcome. Feel free to open an issue or PR.

If you find this plugin useful, please give it a star on GitHub. It helps others discover it.

License

MIT