Ability to sort workspaces by last use

[ngirard]

Heya,

let me start by expressing my gratitude for your efforts into this nice extension: using it helped me a lot !

I can see you've started working on big unreleased new stuff, but there's a low hanging fruit that would be very easy to implement and very valuable to me: adding the ability to sort the workspaces by last time of use.

Could you please consider adding this feature ?

Cheers, and happy new year !

[jsmorabito]

Thanks for the suggestion @ngirard and happy new year! Could you share more information about your use case and how this improvement would benefit your particular workflows? That will help us get a better sense for if and how this feature might fit into the plugin as a whole.

[ngirard]

Well I gradually came to represent what I do as "intents" and "activities", rather than "objectives" and "projects/tasks"; one activity being one markdown file with the appropriate metadata.

So I have many activities, and it makes much sense to associate a workspace to each of them.

(I wish workspaces would be first-class citizens so that I can refer to them using links and create/delete them automatically or semi-automatically, but I digress. For now of course I manually create a workspace manually each time needed, giving it a name similar to or in relation with the related activity).

This feature request would allow me to switch back to the previously used activity much more easily, and see the most recent active activities at a glance.

Other systems offer such functionnality, for instance Org mode with the so-called "clocking commands".

Hope that helps.

[ngirard]

Any thoughts...?

[jsmorabito]

Any thoughts...?

Sorry for the late response @ngirard !!! Yes, many thoughts haha:

• "I wish workspaces would be first-class citizens so that I can refer to them using links and create/delete them automatically or semi-automatically, but I digress"
  • this is a very cool concept and I believe you could hack this together using https://github.com/shabegom/buttons plugin but I assume the interaction cost is too high for it to be useful. feel free to create an issue for this idea if you'd like or I can later, just to keep track of it :)
  • [ ] workspaces as first-class citizens
• a question for you: how many workspaces do you have? from your description it sounds like the potential for very many!
• [ ] previous and next workspace commands
  • could be a useful addition for your workflow and others who find themselves frequently cycling between workspaces

I will discuss the feasibility of this feature (sorting workspaces) with NIL and get back to you. it may be the case that its a larger design challenge than we'd be willing to address before putting out the current features that we are testing in the beta branch. additionally, if you are interested in a user interview feel free to comment here or direct message me on Discord, my name is johnny1093#3137

Thanks!

[ngirard]

how many workspaces do you have?

Currently, around 30. I'd have more than that with the suggested sorting !

Cheers

[ngirard]

Just a friendly reminder than I'm still greatly interested in having this feature implemented.

Seems to me like it is a very low hanging fruit that shouldn't require much effort to implement...

[ronrdev]

Workspace Plus is a session manager. I was going to add a feature request but I think this one is similar enough to just add mine here. It's actually two features. View workspace list in a view that can be added to the sidebar Ability to custom sort workspace list with drag and drop

Reason/use case: Now that Obsidian has tabs and smooth use of multiple panels I use a workspace as a session manager. With the auto save on workspace plus switching it remembers where I left off, so I can pick up the context again. This is great when I have a session saved for researching a project and can jump into a daily note/journal session or a weekly review session, or writing an article, or planning a different project. Each of these sessions has their own tab/pane config and files open, that change as I am working and auto saved on switching to a new workspace/session. This means workspaces are not limited to a single saved state that is reverted to like the standard core plugin.

The indicator on the status bar works great and I use hotkeys most of the time anyway, but the concept of a session manager could be game changing for others like it has been for me. Bringing more visibility to this type of use with a view panel in the side bar and sorting ability would be cool. Maybe even the ability to have sub/nested sessions. Template session settings. Things like that which make it more useful.