Mixed Outline

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Why Mixed Outline?

Your ideas do not always fit inside headings. Reading notes, project plans, study guides, and long drafts often carry their structure in numbered lists too. Mixed Outline brings both into a single sidebar tree, so you can navigate the way you actually write.

What's new in 1.2.0

• Follow your cursor immediately. Clicking, using arrow keys, or editing expands and highlights the matching outline branch without waiting for a scroll. Enabled by default; turn off Follow cursor / 跟随光标 to keep manual control.
• Headings stay out of preceding lists. A heading after a numbered list is now attached to its heading parent, even when heading levels are skipped. Collapsing that list no longer hides the heading.
• Keep the active entry in view. Outline scrolling no longer restores an old position over a newly highlighted entry.

Existing settings are preserved. See the release notes or full changelog.

Features

The illustration above uses fictional sample content. No personal vault screenshots are included.

Installation

From Obsidian

1. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
2. Search for Mixed Outline, install it, and enable it.
3. Click the Open Mixed Outline ribbon icon, or run Mixed Outline: Open mixed outline from the command palette.

Already installed? Open Settings → Community plugins → Check for updates and update Mixed Outline.

Manual installation

Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release. Place all three in <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/mixed-outline/, reload Obsidian, and enable the plugin. Preserve data.json when upgrading; it contains your settings.

Requires Obsidian 1.5.0+. The plugin uses Obsidian and its bundled CodeMirror APIs, with no Node.js or Electron runtime dependencies. Desktop and mobile are declared supported; version 1.2.0 was verified in desktop Obsidian, while mobile and the minimum supported Obsidian version have not been separately tested.

Follow your cursor

In Live Preview or Source mode, click a heading, numbered item, or paragraph. Mixed Outline highlights the corresponding entry, expands it and its ancestors, and collapses unrelated branches. Selecting a parent heading or list item reveals its direct children. Arrow keys and text edits work the same way; no scroll is required.

For ordinary paragraphs, the preceding heading or numbered item determines the current outline entry. Before the first entry, there is nothing to highlight.

Follow cursor / 跟随光标 is on by default, including after upgrading. It is independent of Auto sync to scroll position, which is off by default. Enable scroll sync to follow the visible section while reading; in Reading view, scroll sync provides navigation because there is no editing cursor.

To expand and collapse the tree entirely by hand, turn both settings off.

Jump to end

Click the down arrow above a horizontal line, the last button in the outline toolbar. Its tooltip is 跳转到最后 / Jump to end.

The button brings the current note into editing mode, scrolls the final cursor position into view, and focuses the editor so you can start typing immediately.

• If the note ends with text, one newline is appended.
• If an empty final line already exists, the cursor moves there. Repeated clicks do not accumulate blank lines.
• Empty notes are ready to type into without inserting extra lines.
• Reading view switches to editing first. Live Preview and Source mode remain editable.
• Existing text, including selected text and the contents of a final list item, is preserved.

You can also run Mixed Outline: Jump to end / 跳转到最后 from the command palette, or assign it a hotkey under Settings → Hotkeys. The toolbar button is disabled when no Markdown note is available.

A small example

# Launch notes
## Plan
1. Define the idea
2. Sketch the experience
   1. Keep the outline clear
   2. Make writing effortless
## Next steps
1. Share what you learned

The headings and numbered items appear together. Nested list items sit beneath their parent, and each entry links back to its source line.

How headings and lists fit together

# Project
1. First step
   1. Detail
### Next section
1. Next step

Project
├─ 1. First step
│  └─ 1. Detail
└─ Next section
   └─ 1. Next step

A list belongs to the preceding heading. A later heading uses the heading hierarchy, never the preceding list as its parent. This also applies to skipped heading levels: Next section remains beside First step. A list before the first heading stays at the root alongside that heading.

Mixed Outline recognizes ATX headings (# through ######) and ordered list markers such as 1. or 2). It skips YAML frontmatter, fenced code blocks, unordered lists, and task lists. Ordered items nested inside hidden unordered or task lists are also omitted.

Settings & commands

Available commands: Open mixed outline, Refresh mixed outline, Jump to end / 跳转到最后, and Toggle auto sync outline to scroll position.

Privacy

Mixed Outline processes note content locally. It makes no network requests, collects no telemetry, and needs no account. Its settings are stored in the vault's plugin data.json. Jump to end edits only the targeted note and only appends a newline when needed.

Development

This is a small, directly editable JavaScript plugin. There is no build step or dependency installation.

git clone https://github.com/hemashishi12/mixed-outline.git
cd mixed-outline
node --check main.js
node --test

Use Node.js 18+ for the tests. Copy the three plugin files into a development vault and reload the plugin to try changes.

Implementation notes:

• Reading view must switch to source view state before placing an editable caret. This state covers both Source mode and Live Preview.
• Use editor.replaceRange() at the final position to preserve selected text and normal undo history. Do not rewrite the whole note or simulate Enter, which can continue a list.
• Recheck the target file after asynchronous view changes, and ignore overlapping invocations.
• Clicking the sidebar can change the active pane. Resolve the current Markdown view using the existing active/recent-note tracking.
• For Windows installations where obsidian is not on PATH, invoke Obsidian.com in the installation directory to use CLI diagnostics. Background-window timers can be throttled during live checks.
• Heading levels and list depths share effectiveLevel, but cannot be compared blindly: a new heading must first pop list nodes from the ancestor stack.
• Register cursor tracking through registerEditorExtension() and CodeMirror's updateListener. In the tested Obsidian version, editorInfoField is the Markdown view itself; accept a wrapped .view too. Coalesce selection changes in a microtask after the editor update, and ignore inactive editors.
• Cursor movement may scroll the editor. Cancel pending scroll sync and briefly suppress incidental scroll so it cannot replace the selected line with the viewport's first line. Do not restore the outline's old scroll position after revealing an active entry.

To release: update manifest.json, add the version to versions.json, and publish a GitHub release with an exact numeric tag such as 1.2.0 (no v prefix). Attach main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css. The existing Obsidian community catalog entry points at this repository; normal updates do not require another catalog submission.

Feedback & license

Report a bug or suggest an improvement. Include your Obsidian version, plugin version, and a minimal example using non-private sample text.

Released under the MIT License.