But, I thought I ought to check again - most of the time I have other editors set as default - so I needed to check it still works. (I know, I know, I regard these as Obsidian vaults, but I use external file explorers, and external editors.) I used open with rather than change my defaults temporarily. And it didn’t. Back to the old opening into the last open note. And then into select vault. I know this is how it originally worked (slightly frustrating) but seem to remember it did last time I tried. Possibly a misremembering, because the Obsidian opening sequence has to go Open Vault, Open Note. Maybe Open Note immediately ought to be a FR when Obsidian is already open.
Hmm… I don’t think I understand your response. Maybe I need more coffee.
However, it sounds to me like you’re saying there’s no way for you to use Windows File Explorer to navigate to an Obsidian document (which is just a Markdown file) and open that document in Obsidian. You need to either open it in some other Markdown editor, or navigate to the document in Obsidian and then open it there.
When I tested trying to do it in Obsidian just then, that’s what I found.
I speculated that it may not be possible because Obsidian is not a markdown editor per se, but rather a vault processor that contains a markdown editor. So, from Obsidian’s pov, asking it to open a file can’t work unless it knows what vault it is in. Vaults are unaware of the existence or non-existence of other vaults, so there can never be an assumption that the file will be in Vault X, even if Vault X is the only one that exists. In which case, there must always be an answer to the question ‘Which vault?’ before its editor is able to open any file. And consequently, it’s not something Obsidian will ever be able to do without a change in design. These are only my own presumptions - you may be able to explain why I am mistaken.
That’s my conclusion.
Though, I assume that Obsidian could be redesigned so that Obsidian Editor could operate as a standalone editor, which is automatically triggered when a vault is opened.
And I have just retested and it worked perfectly …
So why then did work today, and not last time?
Ah, the answer to that appears to be coincidence. Obsidian opens into the last open note, which just happened to be the one I just chose. Always opens into the same note, whichever file is selected.
Try it again when Obsidian is already open and it asks to know the Vault.
So my conclusions stand, for the moment.
I see this as a problem for Obsidian. The file explorer would benefit from a lot of upgrading; search works better.
Not a problem for me personally since I am happy to use other editors and usually use links, tags and search when I am working in Obsidian. Probably I would use the Obsidian editor more if it were more directly accessible from external file explorers.
Manual sorting would be awesome indeed. I have noticed that manual sorting is already possible in the “starred notes” pane. This makes me think it could be possible to implement it in the file explorer as well.
Keep up the good work!
I agree with this, I love obsidian but some features I would assume to be easy are hard because of the markdown structure. It drives me a little crazy, but I want to use Obsidian from now on and this would be great.
This would be quite useful, agreed. Especially for fiction writing, to be able to arrange your scenes and chapters manually. I’m close to riding off in the sunset with Scrivener, but I have found the main feature that currently keeps me there is their manual sort.
This is tangentially-related, but could be useful to someone out there — if you want to add ‘separators’ to your list of files or folders in the sidebar, I like to use blank files or folders with names including superscript characters and hyphens. Let me explain with an example — say I want to separate folders starting with T and V, I can put a blank folder between them and name it ᵘ-----------ᵘ. Other subscript and superscript characters work too. I know it’s a bit of a hacky solution, but it could be of some help while a custom-sort feature is deliberated.
This is the biggest feature that I’m missing from obsidian.
I agree that there could be a .json file in .obsidian folder to store all this information, or possibly frontmatter could have a “weight” property which allows you to manually set the ordering of the post. That’s how Hugo does it. It’d allow people to stick to markdown, but I think it would be much less convenient.
I’d like a custom programmatic search. For example, one heuristic that is not at all used is frequency of note access / note editing. If I could do a multi-sort (based on N criteria), that would suit my needs.
To be clear this is different from a fully manual sort that is mainly being discussed in this thread.
The thing to do is “simply” to allow plugins to add new types of sorting in the sort dropdown.