Obsidian Tutorial - Workspaces Basics
My favourite favourite favourite thing to use in Obsidian is hands-down workspaces. They’re a core feature (though I’ll admit I use a plugin to make them shinier) and they’re a key part of my workflow now. I literally do not know what I’d do without them. Here’s how to set them up and use them!
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First of all, what’s a workspace? It’s a layout of notes, tabs, and sidebars in Obsidian that you save under a specific name. That’s it.
You can have as many notes and tabs as you want, split and arranged however you want. The examples below are of my layout for playing Stars Without Number, and working on my current book. They both use split panes, pinned notes, and the sidebars.
[ID - two screenshots of Obsidian note layouts.]
You can switch between these workspaces using the command palette. Why is this good? Why do you want to do this? Well, here’s an example:
You’re working on a novel. You want to tinker at your worldbuilding: you have a bunch of notes open for a new country you’re building. You’re inspired now, you want to go work on the actual novel, but you don’t want all your research stuff open while you do, that’s distracting. You could close all the tabs and notes, open your book, and then re-open them later. OR you could switch to your Writing workspace, that only has a chapter note open, and then switch BACK to your Research workspace when you’re done.
Doesn’t that sound better? Doesn’t it sound nice to be able to swap between spaces like that?
To make a workspace, set up the layout of notes you’d like, then open the command palette with Ctrl+P.
Find the command Workspaces: Manage workspace layouts
In the box, type a name for your workspace and hit save
You now have a workspace!
[ID - a gif demonstrating the above process for making a new workspace in Obsidian]
To switch between workspaces, you’ll again use the command palette:
Select load workspace to open a saved workspace
Select save workspace to save changes you’ve made to your layout
Select save and load another layout to save your changes and open a new workspace
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[ID - a screenshot of the Obsidian command palette, listing all the workspace-related commands]
Vanilla workspaces won’t automatically save changes you make to open tabs, splits, etc, so you’ll want to use save and load if you need that. If you want your layout to stay the same every time you switch, don’t save when you switch to a new one.
Once you have multiple spaces, you can go to manage workspace layouts to see a list of your workspaces, where you can then load or delete them as you like.
Recommendation for this post: Workspaces Plus. It adds a selection of very helpful, very convenient features for making and managing workspaces easier and faster - including the ability to set hotkeys for them, which I use constantly.
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check out the tutorials tag for other obsidian tutorials
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