Erroneous "Plugin No Longer Active" message

What I’m trying to do

Load my Vault normally. Instead what happens is that all the Community Plugins are represented by the “Plugin no longer active” icon. When I click on such an icon, though, the Plugin appears and the icon switches to normal. It’s a minor nuisance (I can’t tell which plugin is which) and I worry it may mean something deeper is wrong.

Things I have tried

Reload app. Restart computer. Reloading individual plugins. Comparing with another Vault. This behavior does NOT occur with the second Vault.

I am on 1.7.7 on a Macbook Air running MacOS 15.2

  1. What is your full “Show debug info”? Or at least, what is your Obsidian installer version? But showing everything would be helpful.
  2. Do you have your vault stored in iCloud or another cloud tool? Might be related, maybe not.
  3. Or what else is different between your two vaults?
  4. Can you share a screenshot?

1 Installer is 1.7.7, same version # as Obsidian (I try to keep both aligned) Debug info is at end of this message.
2 Vault is stored locally and I have Obsidian sync running
3 The Vault without the problem has far fewer plugins. I suppose one of the plugins is the problem?
4 Screenshots. The one with the blank plugin symbol is on startup. Then, when that is clicked on, the plugin appears (second screenshot)

Debug info:
<<SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.7.7
Installer version: v1.7.7
Operating system: Darwin Kernel Version 24.2.0: Fri Dec 6 19:00:33 PST 2024; root:xnu-11215.61.5~2/RELEASE_ARM64_T8122 24.2.0
Login status: logged in
Language: en
Catalyst license: insider
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: dark
Community theme: Typomagical v2.1.1
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 63
Plugins enabled: 58
1: Tag Wrangler v0.6.1
2: Remember cursor position v1.0.9
3: Pane Relief v0.5.6
4: Hover Editor v0.11.21
5: Waypoint v2.1.0
6: Folder Note v0.7.3
7: Meld Encrypt v2.3.7
8: ReadItLater v0.11.0
9: Frontmatter Tag Suggest v0.4.1
10: Doubleshift v2.2.1
11: Markdown Table Editor v0.3.1
12: Tag Summary v2.1.5
13: Recent Files v1.7.4
14: Open Gate v1.11.8
15: Optimize Canvas Connections v1.0.0
16: Style Settings v1.0.9
17: Safe Filename Linter v1.1.4
18: Mononote v1.2.2
19: Tags Overview v1.0.4
20: Quick Tagger v2.2.3
21: Image Converter v1.2.24
22: Slurp v0.1.13
23: Global Search and Replace v0.5.0
24: Search In Canvas v1.1.1
25: Remove Newlines v1.0.5
26: Homepage v4.0.7
27: Learnie v1.4.3
28: Readwise Official v2.1.4
29: Better Word Count v0.10.1
30: Book Search v0.7.5
31: Canvas Filter v0.9.4
32: Canvas2Document v1.2.3
33: Copy Image v1.1.0
34: Docxer v2.1.1
35: Enhanced Annotations v0.1.7
36: Enhancing Export v1.10.9
37: Etymology Lookup v1.0.4
38: Hotkey Helper v0.3.20
39: Bookmarks Caller v0.5.6
40: External Links v1.0.12
41: PopKit v1.1.0
42: Dataview v0.5.67
43: Vertical Tabs View v2.6.0
44: Text Analysis v1.2.1
45: Settings profiles v0.5.9
46: Find Orphaned Images v1.1.0
47: Copilot v2.8.0
48: Vault Full Statistics v1.2.2
49: Perplexity Converter v1.0.5
50: PDF++ v0.40.23
51: Recently Added Files v1.0.9
52: Paper Importer v1.0.5
53: Export to HTML v1.1.0
54: Footnote Shortcut v0.1.3
55: Lumberjack :axe: :wood: v1.3.0
56: External File Embed and Link v1.1.0
57: Outliner v4.8.1
58: Lineage v0.7.1-beta


Definitely sounds like a plugin issue. That is a lot of plugins lol

I’ve seen this displayed before.

Normally, it comes from the following issue: the active (saved) workspace sidebar items are populated with third party elements (plugins) no longer active. I often had this when I wanted to keep an icon position reserved for a plugin that I might switch back on any time soon.
That is the usual problem. A plugin is disabled.
The normal solution is closing it and saving the (dedicated) workspace. A non-dedicated (not custom) workspace is automatically saved by Obsidian.

But from what you are writing, the plugins in question are actually enabled.
I’ve seen this case also. But I’ve chalked this up to some plugins being loaded after the workspace is in view by the Lazy Plugins plugin. Which you don’t have installed (or currently enabled?).
Here the solution is clicking on the icon and they come back alive.

So if there’s nothing delaying the loading of your plugins, then I’m guessing this could be an actual bug…since…I dunno…maybe since ver. 1.7ish…?

I don’t use Sync but I fail to how that would affect anything. It’s not theme related and from your plugins I cannot deduce anything. The last I did vanilla Obsidian checks was months ago.

I wonder how other people fare.

Yeah, I know. I try a lot if ideas and sometimes don’t prune. And some I use rarely but do use.

Hmm. Thanks for the workspace mention. Perhaps it has to do with that. . I’ll try seeing if changes there make a difference.

One thing I also could try is removing plugins that are installed but not enabled. Maybe that’s causing some glitch about whether a plugin is active.

Will also try to see if having way fewer plugins load makes a difference.

Well, I made the mistake of trying to create a new Workspace file in the .obsidian folder. Now I have only a few community plugins loading, and no icons until I use the command palette to call for them.

For plugins that don’t have a command, I can’t access anything. Even though Obsidian reports that they loaded.

I wish I had left well enough alone, and not tried to solve this. At least before I had placeholder blank icons that I could click on to call up a plugin. Now it’s unworkable and I have no idea what to do.

I tried reinstalling obsidian. No luck there.

Reinstalling the app doesn’t change your vault settings files.

Why? And how?

Do you mean you manually created the workspace.json file with a text editor?

This kind of experimentation is a good use case for keeping good backups, and/or incremental version control with tools like git.

That said, (backup first! copy these files somewhere safe), you could try just deleting the workspace.json file and/or workspaces.json, and it should regenerate a fresh one. You’ll lose any workspace settings, but it should parse it correctly when it makes a new one.


I have no idea what the issue is. I assume it’s from your huge list of plugins, and not related to workspaces. Your workspace might be experiencing symptoms from the problem. I highly highly doubt tweaking the workspace is going to fix the issue.

The community plugin Divide and Conquer can help group plugins to deactivate to isolate which ones might be causing problems.

This statement made commentators think it was a plugin issue.

Everything else you provided as symptoms were connected to some (not ‘all’) icons belonging to plugins on some sidebar elements on the workspace.

I have just seen this behavior on my iPad as well. Which also runs on Lazy Loader (by AlanG), so I expect the plugins’ icons and names not shown because of this.
The workspace is loaded before the plugins are loaded. That’s why the icons and even the names of core or 3rd party plugins may be missing.

But you may try to regain the plugin icons if you click on all of them and save a new workspace, through Obsidian, not through some workspaces or workspace.json editing wizardry.

But the underlying issue needs investigated if you don’t use Lazy Loader.

This is what I wrote above.
I’m sorry if you misunderstood something.

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Thanks for the Divide and Conquer tip! As it happens, I have the plugins appearing correctly in the ribbon, but not the sidebars. If I don’t hide the ribbon I can use that for the plugins that I can’t access via the command palette.

My next mission is to trim the plugins to about half what I have now, because, you’re right, it’s kind of nuts. Too many could-be-someday entries in there.

Thanks again for the advice. Much appreciated!

I see. Thanks for clarifying.

Further investigation here has turned up this message in the Console:
<You are loading @emotion/react when it is already loaded. Running multiple instances may cause problems. This can happen if multiple versions are used, or if multiple builds of the same version are used.>

The culprit is a plugin called “Tags Overview.” I trashed it, restarted, error no longer reported. Then I re-installed it and the error is back.

Does anyone know how I can get “emotion/react” to load only once? Or do I just have to live without this plugin? (It’s handy but not worth the trouble if there is no way to fix the emotion/react problem.)

I don’t know how to respond other than:

  • Chuck plugins that are no longer working well with the current Obsidian version.
    • No idea what ‘emotion/react is’ … maybe the plugin mentioned uses internal React components? Table view?
  • Did any of the Divide&Conquer help toward finding the problem?

@emotion/react is a CSS-in-JS library specifically designed for React applications that allows developers to write CSS styles directly in JavaScript”

Yes, divide-and-conquer did the trick. Looking at the debug console after loading plugins, I was able to spot those that generated errors and scrub them.

Well, there are plugins with issues or warnings printed in the console, but they can still work.
I meant more about the original problem of your icons saying not active.

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Well, I don’t have this problem any more, having junked a bunch of plugins and all workspaces.

I just tested creating a workspace, restarting, and loading that workspace. It worked fine. No blank icons.

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Well, that’s at least comforting. But we don’t know what has caused it?
The React component plugin…Tags Overview?

I don’t think that’s something you can handle, unless you are comfortable editing/forking the plugin.

What you can do is (search first) and consider filing an bug on the Tag Overview plugin’s Github page. However, it looks like there might be one that’s relevant. Hard to tell because it’s title-only. No description. So your added details might actually help: The command for opening the tag overview's panel seem to be bugged. · Issue #42 · christianwannerstedt/obsidian-tags-overview · GitHub

It seems like the plugin hasn’t been updated in a while, so it might be a new bug in relation to changes in Obsidian. You might have to find an alternative plugin, or live without the functionality for now.

(And that specific error might only be a coincidence. There might be a distinct bug in the plugin causing your issue directly. Hard to say. All we likely know is that the plugin is (probably) causing the bug. Or more pedantically, that disabling the plugin fixes your bug.)

(Edit, I replied in that bug, and linked back to this forum thread.)

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