am i missing something? we can’t access .obsidian in the file tree?
I don’t see Obsidian as a text editor at all.
I see it as a manager of markdown file vaults which includes a markdown editor.
The txt to md plugin allows some editing to be extended to other plaintext extensions (if you add them).
2 Likes
i don’t know. it’s become a pretty ubiquitous tool. it just doesn’t make sense in my case when a majority of my knowledge base is around .dotfiles so i’m constantly juggling windows between obsidian and vscode copy pasting back and forth.
i’m even more puzzled by not being able to see obsidian’s own config folder. we’re not kids, we don’t need our file tree dumbed down.
and why can’t we see file extensions?
sorry, i’m venting at this point. these annoyances have gotten to me over the past months.
1 Like
They’re limitations. Some are deliberate, some may be tackled in future.
Obsidian can do many things, but there are many things it cannot and some of those are by design.
.folders have always been hidden in Obsidian - and obviously they were designed to be hidden from most users in the OS, so I’m not sure that’s an unreasonable limitation.
Only md is seen amongst the many markdown extensions.
Originally only pdf and image extensions were also visible, though that has been slightly extended.
The txt to md plugin allows you to see and edit other plaintext extensions, so long as you add them to its code, but there was consistent resistance by the devs to adding more extensions to core ( Handle (edit) other plain text file formats ( rmarkdown, tex, txt, code, etc ) ).
The file explorer seems likely to be improved, but, given the above, I’m not sure it will move in the direction you would like.
I do most of my work with the files in Obsidian vaults outside Obsidian, and I’m completely fine with that.
2 Likes
Agreed. Obsidian isn’t a text editor for markdown files. Its a “knowledge-base” application that stores your info in markdown format. BIG DIFFERENCE.
2 Likes
i could see the design decision if obsidian was a minimalistic editor. but it is very very far from that. lol
fair enough, it wouldn’t hurt to have a toggle though 
2 Likes
+1 need option to turn this on or off
@kleerkoat and others in this thread, have you considered looking at other tools which might fit your workflow better?
Rather than trying to force Obsidian to be an all-files-text-editor, why not consider using VSCode as your PKM app?
Dendron is open-source Markdown PKM built on VSCode:
You could link the folders you are interested in to a path, under which you want to access them, that’s what I do with the CSS snippets for example.