First Look: Obsidian Footnotes Viewer

Just added in version 1.9.1, this viewer hints at a new approach to footnotes.

Version 1.9.1 of Obsidian includes a footnotes viewer, which is a now core plugin, although you have to toggle it on.

This sidesteps an Obsidian headache, so you can see your footnotes without having to switch to read mode to see all footnotes.

(Note: I dragged the footnote viewer from the side panel into a tab beside the file I was editing, which going forward may be the norm for me.)

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I am a huge user of footnotes, mostly in the form of side notes (see Wonkish: Obsidian Footnotes As Sidenotes and Obsidian Tufte-style Sidenotes), so I really appreciate being able to see all footnotes in a side panel. Here's a large note with many footnotes:

But while fooling around with the viewer, I found a glaring omission: I should be able to click on a footnote in the viewer and have the edit window jump to the clicked footnote. That's coming, I bet; because, of course, it should.

Note that you can edit the footnote text in the viewer window, which is helpful when the original is not visible.

But I uncovered an interesting fact. When I control-click on the footnote reference in the viewer, I can control-click to 'Copy link to block'. Odd, because a footnote isn't a block -- or at least it wasn't until this release. Note in this image how a block id shows up inside the footnote:

I can search for the block id in Obsidian search, and clicking the result centers the file on the embedded block id.

I can also control-click to 'Copy block embed' which leads to a properly formed embed, that however doesn't transclude the footnote reference. That's strange, since the viewer is basically a transclusion of a list of footnotes. Maybe below the hood, Obsidian is using this newly expanded model of block ids to build the viewer?

When I try to transclude I get this:

which looks like an error message. If I take off the leading exclamation mark, making the line just a block id reference, it also fails to find the block id.

It’s fascinating to imagine that Obsidian might support, in the future, addressable sub-blocks, where sections of blocks could be addressable. This may turn out to be just a wrinkle in the current beta, but it raises big questions.

Conclusions

Footnote viewer is a big help for those who rely on footnotes, like me.