Can someone explain why different Vaults don't share "things that should be common"?

[stdedos]

First, search the help docs and this forum. Maybe your question has been answered! The debugging steps can help, too. Still stuck? Delete this line and proceed.

What I’m trying to do

I’d like to create separate Vaults for different aspects (Hobbies, Gym) - and sometimes even “one-offs” for dedicated topics (e.g. 2024 Vacations). That also resonates to me, since I add the vaults in a VCS.

However, it seems to me like “things I expect to be the same”, they are not: My plugins do not carry over, settings, layouts etc.

I’m using Obsidian as “the text editor for md”. Similar to VSCode, my expectation is that it retains its settings, plugins, etc., across different projects without loss.

Instead, each Obsidian Vault seems like its acting as a different browser profile.

Things I have tried

[ariehen]

By design, each vault is a silo with its own .obsidian settings folder. If you find a setup you like, you can copy & paste the original .obsidian settings folder to any new vaults you create. The settings/plugins/themes/CSS snippets will be the same as a the previous vault.

There’s a feature request here to share settings between vaults:

Global Settings / Same settings, themes, and plugins across multiple vaults

Current problem Most users have spent hours highly customizing Obsidian to meet our needs and preferences via settings, themes, CSS snippets, plugins, etc. But whenever we add a new vault—or want to temporarily designate a folder as a vault to use Obsidian on the files inside it—that’s all left behind, as if we’re opening Obsidian for the very first time. The only workaround (see below) is cumbersome. Proposed solution Option 1: Add the option to store the .obsidian configuration folder as …