This is an Obsidian.md plugin for synchronizing the state of the active view or workspace layouts among devices.
It does NOT sync files, unlike Obsidian Sync. It syncs the state of the active view (e.g. file opened) or workspace layouts (e.g. arrangement of tabs and windows).
View Sync assumes the files in your vault are already synchronized using some other real-time sync solutions such as:
So you need to set up one before using this plugin. After that, configure View Sync on all the devices according to your use case. I will show you a typical example below.
In View Sync, a device is followed by one or more other devices. Here I call the followed one the main device.
The state of the main device's active view is tracked by a plain text file in your vault.
You can specify its path in the plugin settings.
It can be anything; let's say view-sync-desktop.json for example.
The file view-sync-desktop.json stores information about the state of the active view at each moment.
Each time you focus on a new tab on the main device, view-sync-desktop.json is updated.
Since files are synchronized via a service like Obsidian Sync, the updated view-sync-desktop.json is also sent to the follower devices as well.
When view-sync-desktop.json is updated in a follower device, View Sync reflects the view state saved in it to the active tab in the follower device.
As a result, the follower device can always keep up with the main device.
Set up View Sync both on a desktop device and your iPad according to the following. In this case, the iPad is a follower of the desktop.
Then, every time you open a PDF file on the desktop, the same PDF will be also opened on your iPad, and the "Share" menu (see below) will pop up at the same time. You can start handwriting or drawing by selecting Markup. After finishing handwriting, tap Done > Delete PDF (I know, it's confusing). It will save the handwriting to the original PDF file, and it will immediately appear in Obsidian's PDF viewer on your iPad. Moreover, it will also reflected soon on the desktop thanks to Obsidian Sync (or any other sync solutions of your choice).
Tip
In the above workflow, Markup can be replaced with any other app that can add drawings directly to the original PDF without making copies. My recommendation is NotesWriter Pro.
Since the desktop is the main device in this example, you only have to fill in the first two options.
- File to track active view states for this device: type any file path here.
- View types to record: we want to sync PDF views only, so we write
pdfhere.
Your iPad is just a follower device, so you don't have to fill in the first two options. Instead, all the other options need to be specified.
- Follow another device: turn it on because this device is a follower device.
- Path of the active view state file for the followed device: write the file path that you specified in the desktop settings.
- Show "Share" menu after sync: this is optional, but it will definitely make the workflow smoother in this case!
In this example, the active view state file is a .json file. In order to sync .json file with Obsidian Sync, you need to enable the Sync all other types option.
Note that the file extension does not need to be .json. If you choose .md, you don't need to enable this option although the active view state file might clutter search results.
Since this plugin is still in its beta, it's not available in the community plugin browser yet.
But you can install the latest release using BRAT.
- Install the latest version of BRAT and enable it.
- (Optional but highly recommended) In the BRAT settings, turn on
Auto-update plugins at startupat the top of the page. - Open the following URL in the browser:
obsidian://brat?plugin=RyotaUshio/obsidian-view-sync. - Click the "Add Plugin" button.
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