Custom sorting of folders, not alphabetic or date, my own step by step

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I’m trying to order my folders my way, not alphabetic.

Hi all! I’m new to Obsidian checking it out to see if it fits my workflow. Have run into a wall.

What I’d like to do is order my notes using my own logical progression, and not arbitrarily alphabetical order that it seems stuck with (or created/modified date). But the folders and notes I create all stubbornly lock into alphabetical order. The little icon at the top for “change sort order” only allows alphabetical or created/modified date sorting.

How does one create a custom ordering of notes and folders with obsidian?
I looked through the official obsidian help & support page but didn’t find anything.

Note the support page itself does what I want to do. The left sidebar is ordered by the logical progression of the information they want you to go through, step by step. That’s what I want! How did they do it? Is there some simple thing somewhere to toggle?

That’s what I want: to lay down my folders and notes in my own logical order. How do I override the alphabetical and date stuff?

Things I have tried

I searched the help/support page and read about “sort” and “table of contents” and “tags” in the hopes that might have some insight into the order. But nothing jumped out. I checked out some videos, but they were confusing.

I’m used to Workflowy which lets you move your notes in any order. Likewise scrivener. Just drag and drop and it stays in the order you set.

Also: side note: it would really help if the Help & Support page had more visual references. Like a starter image of the page layout that identifies the things you would see when you open a document. A basic map.

Thank you for any feedback :slight_smile:

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Courtesy of CawlinTeffid, here’s a pinned post (on Discord) with your current custom sorting options:

If you want to sort your Obsidian files/folders in ways the default file browser doesn’t offer, here are some options:

No plugins needed:

  • Bookmarks (if you don’t
    need to reorder huge numbers of items)
  • Add numbers to the beginning of filenames

Community plugins:

  • Custom File Explorer Sorting (Alas, a change in Obsidian made it so you may have to reapply the sort when the app reloads.
    (https://github.com/SebastianMC/obsidian-custom-sort/issues/193)
  • Manual Sorting (enables drag and drop reordering in file browser; as of 2025-03-07 it’s only a month old)
  • FolderFile Splitter (3-pane view that supports pinning and drag-drop reordering; as of 2025-03-12 it’s only 2 weeks old)
  • File Tree Alternative
  • File Order (relies on numbered names but lets you renumber by drag-and-drop)
  • Make.MD (but it’s a mega-plugin that makes a lot of other changes too)
  • Bartender (beta plugin not available in the plugin store) https://github.com/Mara-Li/obsidian-bartender (which is a maintained fork of the original https://github.com/nothingislost/obsidian-bartender)

Relevant feature requests:

There’s a request here with a few images of the Obsidian UI:

1 Like
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Thank you! This is great. I think the Bookmark option will work for me. In other exploration, it also looks like a lot of people set up an “MOC” document as a makeshift guide/table of contents of sorts. This is an interesting mental shift - building a document up through its links rather than through imposing hierarchy from the start. Thanks again for your help!