Faded files

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

The setting in Files and links > Advanced > Excluded file causes two problem to a lot of members in the community:

  1. It’s confusing. Even though the setting’s description is there and the documentation is clear, people keep asking about misconceptions from time to time.
  2. It’s a feature we miss. Lots of us would love to have a ignore setting, for several reasons I’ll extend on soon.

Proposed solution

I see an “easy” two steps solution.

The first step could be deploy in the next release (at time this is accepted): Rename this setting to “Faded files”. Description now reads: “Ignored files will be hidden in Search, … less noticeable in Quick Switcher…“.

I will this greatly reduce the expectations “we” have from this setting, and will help reducing the amount of question, and the amount of frustration towards how this behaves. It’s a simple label update.

Later on, the second step which this FR is really about. Introduce the setting “Ignored files”.
Ignored file would be not indexed, not read on vault opening, not anything. Obsidian just bypass them. Until the file is embedded, or read by a plugin.

Current workaround

To ignore files, we currently have to store them out of the vault, and setup complex environments to access them from within our vaults. Several external sync tools, web servers, cross platform solutions, homelab or dedicated servers. You name it!

Or otherwise, the other choice we have is to… Not ignore them. Have 20k items in our vault, 17k being images, icons, resource files. This introduce number of other problems.

What gets solved & Related feature requests

  1. Gets ride of the confusions and assumptions around the Excluded files term.
    1. /t/ignored-folder-not-really-ignored/47542
    2. Number of Discord messages. “I thought excluding a folder would”
  2. Reduces chances to hit the 10k items limit of the suggester algorithm.
    1. /t/…quick-switcher-…-algorithm-above-10000-items…/56861
    2. Also a good chunk of Discord messages. “not index specific folder”, “remove from quick switcher”
  3. Let people have files available to be embedded or used by plugin without polluting the Files (Explorer), Quick Switch, Search, …
    1. A few Discord messages as well. “exclude from base”, “my vault is 94% disk size attachments”, “any way to exclude images from the quick switcher“
  4. Better performances for large vault, especially on mobile.
    1. I know there’s upcoming work on this going on (as written in the roadmap), but I believe that would help anyway?

If you have other good reasons, related FR, or want to suggest an edit to this post, please comment here or ping me on Discord (DM accepted).

2

Here’s the request for “actually totally ignore”: Ignore/exclude completely files or a folder from all obsidian indexers and parsers.

Renaming the setting is an interesting idea. I think “faded” may not be intuitive enough but I don’t have a replacement suggestion. Brainstorming a bit:

  • Muted
  • Deemphasized
  • Suppressed
  • Backgrounded
3

I should have search more intensively
Thanks for the link!

Adding other alternatives as well:

  • Dimmed
  • Deprioritized (too long?)
  • Shadowed
  • Minimized (meh)