Wonkish: Obsidian Footnotes As Sidenotes

Following in Edward Tufte’s footnotes, er, footsteps.

Tufte’s Sidenotes

I have wanted for some time to have Obsidian footnotes displayed as sidenotes in the style advocated by Edward Tufte, as shown, here:

I’ve tried a variety of hacks from the Obsidian community, but they are inadequate. I have simply come to act as if someone at some point will implement a plugin or a tweak to a theme to implement them. So I have simply started to use footnotes regularly under the assumption that a glorious day is coming when they will be realized.

This post is simply a description of my wishlist for how they might be realized, and a few comments as to how they sort of work for me in the interim.

How It Might Look

Here’s a mock-up of what Tufte sidenotes might look like. First, a fragment of an Obsidian file, where I have at the top a footnote at the end of a task, and another at the end of the last paragraph.

The task is quite elaborate. The first characters — ` - [>]` - mean that this is an in-process piece of work, probably heavily annotated. The Dataview in-line attributes - ` [ø:: work futures] [øø:: #work/human-centered]` - allow me to find this task through various search…