Enable dendron functionality in any workspace, folder, or window

[DanielHZhang]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Coming from Obsidian, one of the reasons why I tried dendron was so that I could unify the program where I take notes with the program where I do most of my work (VSCode). Often times I need to take notes while coding. To my knowledge, dendron requires a dendron workspace to be open to have most of its functionality enabled (i.e. dendron.createDailyJournalNote fails with error: "engine not set" when invoked in a non-dendron workspace).

Describe alternatives you've considered
Currently, I have to keep one VSCode window dedicated to the dendron workspace alongside other windows for coding. This leads to frustrating context switching when writing notes that require code references (i.e. frequent Alt+Tab-ing between windows) and makes dendron's note-taking workflow feel similar to external programs with no VSCode interface, such as Obsidian.

Describe the solution you'd like
I think it would be useful to have the dendron hierarchy/view tree in its own activity bar pane when you are in any workspace other than a dendron workspace (similar to GitLens's implementation). Creating notes, lookup, and other functionality should work in reference to the selected dendron workspace regardless of the workspace/window you're currently in. I'm unsure of the performance ramifications of such a feature, but if they're significant then only a subset of key features could be enabled.

[kevinslin]

thanks for the feature request. definitely see the use case for having dendron live alongside your vscode projects.

the reason we currently require the workspace is because dendron has a bunch of workspace related features that look for changes in files within the workspace and update dendron's internal index. while it's possible to support dendron without a workspace, it's not currently implemented

what we can do is set a flag to turn any existing vscode workspace into a dendron workspace. this would require that dendron be able to ignore folders that are not notes and will work well as long as you keep your notes in a separate folder from your code.

if this works for your use case, I can add it to our November milestones.

in the meanwhile, we do support adding existing folders to your dendron workspace which is not what you asked for but might be a stopgap in the meantime: https://dendron.so/notes/401c5889-20ae-4b3a-8468-269def4b4865.html#use-dendron-with-a-current-folder

[kpathakota]

This is also tracked in the public roadmap as #41. We will try to tackle both of these in that one epic.