Desktop & Taskbar Shortcut for Different Vaults (Windows 11)

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Hello, for a while I was searching for a way to have 2 different vaults with different icons on my taskbar. There are some workarounds but I couldn’t find anything that suited my needs, so I came up with this solution.

This will help you get a shortcut that you can place on your taskbar which will open a specific vault.

Create the windows shortcut (this is just a utility file)

  1. Right click in a folder and create a new shortcut
  2. Name it something short and easy to note which vault this is pointing to. I have a vault called “Personal”, so I will name this shortcut “personal”
  3. Set the URL (path) to your vault with this syntax (remove the curly brackets):
    obsidian://open/?path={PATH_TO_YOUR_VAULT}

Create the bat file (this is what you put on your taskbar and what you will click on to open the vault)

  1. Create a new .bat file in the same folder as your shortcut. I will name it “personal obsidian.bat”
  2. Edit the contents of the .bat file as so:
@echo off
start "" "personal.url"
  1. Save the bat file
  2. Rename the file to “personal obsidian.exe” (aka change the file extension to exe. you will need the setting to see extensions on in windows)
  3. Now that it is an exe, you can right click this file and pin to your taskbar
  4. – If you want to change the icon for this shortcut on your taskbar, you need to do it while it is an exe file. Right click the exe and go into properties. There will be an option to change the icon. This tutorial will not cover how to do that, but you can find things online for making custom icons for windows. I just took a picture of the default obsidian icon and put it in photopea.com to change the color to orange for my vault
  5. Once the exe is pinned, you can rename the file and turn it back into a .bat extension → “personal obsidian.bat”

I hope it helps!

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