Trynalist

A Dynalist-style outliner for Obsidian. Every line of an outline is a real Markdown note in your vault, so nothing is locked inside the plugin.

Trynalist, short for Tryin' to make an Obsidian plugin based on Dynalist.

Beta. This is distributed for testing through BRAT and is not in the Obsidian community plugin store. Expect rough edges, and keep backups of any vault you try it in.

Installing with BRAT

1. Install the BRAT plugin from Obsidian's community plugins.
2. In BRAT's settings, choose Add beta plugin.
3. Paste grub-basket/Trynalist.
4. Enable Trynalist in Community plugins.

BRAT will pick up new releases as they are published.

What it does

• Documents live under a root folder (Trynalist/ by default), one subfolder per document, identified by a <Doc>.trynalist manifest.
• Every outline line is one Markdown file. Its frontmatter carries the structure: a unique id, a parent link, a fractional order among siblings, the authored indent, a normalised depth, timestamps, and item state (checkbox, collapsed, heading level, colour, due date).
• The file body is the line and its note — first line is the item, the rest is the note underneath it.
• Four views: outline, flat, article, and a read-only mind map.
• Notes render as real Markdown through Obsidian's own renderer, so fenced code gets syntax highlighting and a copy button, and tables, callouts, math and embeds all work.
• Mirrors and portals: show a subtree from elsewhere — including another document — as a read-only window.
• Import from Dynalist OPML, Dynalist JSON, or indented text. Export to a .trynalist.zip holding a readable Markdown outline plus lossless metadata.

Deleted items go to the vault trash. They are never hard-deleted.

Keyboard

Enter new item · Tab / Shift+Tab indent and outdent · Alt+↑/↓ move an item · Cmd/Ctrl+Enter toggle complete · Shift+Enter edit the item's note, and again to come back · Alt+Enter line break inside an item · Backspace on an empty item deletes it.

Click a bullet to collapse, the magnifier beside it to zoom in, and the breadcrumbs to zoom back out.

Dynalist's chords are the defaults, including Mod+A (select one level up), Mod+F (search this document), Mod+↑/↓ (move an item) and Mod+] / Mod+[ (zoom in and out). They are safe to claim because every Trynalist command fires only while the keyboard is genuinely inside a Trynalist document — with a sidebar, a search box or another plugin's pane focused, the same chord does whatever it normally would. Clear any of them in Obsidian's hotkey settings if you would rather keep the chord for something else.

Where this differs from Dynalist

Trynalist aims at parity, and most of it is parity. The deliberate departures:

• Six heading levels instead of three. Items are Markdown rendered by Obsidian, which already has H1–H6; capping at three would have removed levels that work. Documents imported from Dynalist are unaffected.

• The bullet collapses and a magnifier zooms, as in Dynalist, and the preference that swaps them is here too. When the bullet is set to zoom, it turns into a magnifier on hover so the two controls never look identical.

• No sharing, publishing, or accounts. Documents are files in your vault, so Obsidian Sync, Git, or any folder-sharing tool already covers it.

• Attachments live beside their document, so moving, exporting or converting one takes its files along.

• Nothing is paywalled. Several of these were Dynalist Pro features.

• Dynalist's themes are not included. Trynalist inherits your Obsidian theme. The per-item colour swatches are here; the whole-app themes are not.

• An item's text and its note render differently. A note gets Obsidian's full Markdown — blocks, tables, callouts, fenced code, embeds. An item's own text gets inline formatting only: bold, italic, highlight, strikethrough, code, maths, links, tags, dates, sub- and superscript. A blockquote or a table typed into an item stays exactly as you typed it.

  This is deliberate. An item is one line, while those constructs are multi-line by definition — rendering them in a row would make a row sometimes a line and sometimes a block container, and the bullet position, row height, drag targets and cursor behaviour all depend on a row being a line. Shift+Enter puts you in the note, which handles all of it.

Didn't make it across

Honest list of Dynalist behaviour that is not here, beyond the deliberate departures above.

• Dynalist's themes. Trynalist uses your Obsidian theme; see above.
• Sharing, publishing, and accounts. Out of scope by design.

Status

Mirrors are read-only for now: editing through one means writing into another document, and undo would have to span both. The read-only window works today.

Licence

MIT.