Use case or problem
For someone that uses multiple vaults to separate projects, the ability to enable/disable plugins and have them maintain state per vault is awesome. The need to re-download a community plugin that you use all the time, however, makes little sense…especially when factoring in the need to update plugins.
Proposed solution
There are likely multiple ways to implement this, however a centralized local ‘community plugins’ repo that obsidian is aware of (either a database or folder repo with some sort of list that tracks which vault uses which installed plugins) and can offer symlinks to plugins that are frequently used, might be a way to implement it.
Pros:
- Instead of having to re-download each time you make a new vault, and having to spend time updating plugins across each vault as you access it, this would save time in ‘micro-transaction’ style that eventually builds up to more time saved…a good feature for a program that seems to be all about efficiency.
- Centralizing plugin management will make it easier/faster to dig out any plugins that become an issue across vaults due to either corruption, bad code practices/security issues, or malicious code.
- Saves space! Yeah, I know, each plugin is only a couple hundred kb in size and hdd’s are (relatively) massive now and this is likely a non-issue for most, but for those people or organizations that do deep scans on viruses/malware etc. or run software that for whatever reason runs iterations through system folders, it could reasonably help cut down processing time for those types of programs. - Like I said, probably a non-issue for most.
Cons:
- possible need to rewrite the way community plugins are handled.
- easier for a ‘destructive’ plugin to damage multiple vaults
request for comment:
I’m sure there are other pros and cons to restructuring how plugins are handled, however I’ll leave it to others better versed in Obsidian, its code and how plugins are handled to hash that out in the comments.
Thank you for your time and consideration of this request.
~ D