Lookout

Lookout

Survey wide content instead of scrolling sideways.

Lookout is an Obsidian plugin for reading wide Mermaid diagrams and wide tables. Instead of squinting through a note's narrow horizontal scrollbar, pan and zoom a diagram, fit it to the frame, or throw either a diagram or a table up full-screen.

The controls follow a quiet drafting / survey-instrument visual language: they borrow Obsidian's own theme surfaces, with a single survey-cyan accent reserved for focus and the active zoom gauge.

Features

Mermaid diagrams

Each rendered Mermaid diagram gets an unobtrusive instrument toolbar (it fades in on hover):

• Pan — drag, or scroll with the mouse wheel (Shift maps a vertical wheel to horizontal). At an edge with nowhere to go, scrolling releases back to the page.
• Zoom — Ctrl / Cmd + wheel zooms toward the cursor, or use the + / − buttons.
• Gauge — a monospace readout shows the current zoom; click it to snap back to 100 %, top-left.
• Fit to frame — scales the whole diagram to the frame.
• Full screen — opens the diagram in a focused full-screen canvas with the same controls.

The inline frame hugs the diagram's natural (100 %) height, so a fully visible diagram has no dead space; tall diagrams are capped at 70 % of the window height and pan.

Tables

Wide tables keep their normal horizontal scroll but gain a single full-screen button (no zoom) pinned to the visible top-right corner. Full screen shows the table in a maximized scroll area where its full width fits far better than in the note's narrow reading column.

Tables are enhanced in both Reading view and Live Preview; the table you are actively editing is left untouched.

Keyboard & commands

When a diagram frame is focused (or in full screen):

A command, “Open the active note's first Mermaid diagram full screen”, is available from the command palette and can be bound to a hotkey.

Installation

Lookout works on both desktop and mobile (Obsidian 1.0.0+).

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Create a folder lookout under your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory and place the three files inside it.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Lookout under Settings → Community plugins.

BRAT (beta)

Add Post-Math/Lookout as a beta plugin with the BRAT plugin to track pre-release builds.

Support

Found a bug or have an idea? Please use the issue tracker. For security reports, see SECURITY.md.

Contributing & development

Contributions are welcome! Start with CONTRIBUTING.md for the workflow and our Code of Conduct, and see docs/DEVELOPMENT.md for the local setup, the checks to run, and an architecture overview. In short: Lookout is written in TypeScript (src/main.ts) and bundled to main.js with esbuild — npm ci, then npm run dev to watch-build while you edit.

License

MIT © Post-Math