Flat view - Folder toggle - (mode to only show files in Explorer pane)

Although I am happy with the organization that folder structures bring, occasionally it would be very helpful to toggle them off and just have the vault’s notes visible.

While in Folders Off Mode, new notes should probably be created at highest level rather than within the folder of the note you are within during creation.

Sorry, if this was already posted. I checked, and was surprised not to find it. Thank you very much.

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Nice suggestion

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I agree, nice suggestion! To express it another way, it would be nice to have an “All Notes” view, that just shows a flat view of all notes in the entire vault.

In Ulysses for example, there is an “All” view.

For new note behaviour, the current options are to use 1) a default folder that you specify, or 2) the Vault root. 3) There is also an option “Same Folder As The File Is In”. Which would make it in the same folder as your current active note, as far as I understand. I don’t think any of those options would necessarily need to change behaviour, depending on how you are viewing/sorting in your File Explorer. (Or am I wrong?)

In the meantime, it is possible to search for asterisk *, and then “Collapse results”, which shows only the titles. I can’t verify if it is showing every note in my vault. It seems to be. (I don’t think this is a replacement for your suggestion, because you can’t seem to sort or anything from this search.)

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agreed.
a flat file view would be extremely useful, even more so if it was possible to sort files by ACCESSED time (not last edit)

This way we could have a ‘history’ list of notes / last readings. (for that I currently flatten the vault folder in XYPlorer or use an external autohotkey script to parse all files by last accessed time, but it would be nice to have it built-in into obsidian).

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The Recent Files plugin solves some of these problems for me.

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Looks like there is still no way to show a short flat list of recently modified files in File Explorer on in some other pane.

This would be very awesome. I was planning to have a single vault for all the areas instead of multiple vaults. But it gets overwhelming to see the multiple folders.

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I agree!

Since this request seems to be gaining interest slowly but surely, I am going to adjust the title from “folder toggle - temporarily only show notes in explorer” to “Flat view - Folder toggle - (mode to only show files in Explorer pane)”.

I am definitely open to suggestions for further editing both the title and the request. The important thing is for it to be clear and concise, neither of which are my strong suits.

I probably should have taken the kind hint from @rigmarole a long time ago. Better late than never.

Thanks.

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I was just thinking that it may be a cool bonus to be able to apply the “flat view” to specific folders. In doing this, it could indicate that you are in flat view for such and such folder, thus only showing the files for that folder and all of its sub folders. As another bonus, maybe it could also work on multiple folders. Perhaps, in addition to the multi folder functionality, it’d be nice to be able to exclude certain sub folders from the flat view as well.

I still think the default command should simply show all files for the entire vault, but have a feeling these added features would be welcome additions.

Thanks.

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The File Tree Alternative by default "lists all files including the files under sub-folders . You can turn off this option from plugin settings if you want to see only the files under the folder you selected. You can also turn on toggle button from the plugin settings and it’ll include an additional button (looks like an eye) to toggle files under sub-folders". (It also differs in other ways from the default file browser, so might not be perfect for you.)

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This is a great solution, however there seems to be a bug [BUG] Working file disapears from file list · Issue #88 · ozntel/file-tree-alternative · GitHub

Is there anyone else experiencing this issue with the subfolder view?

I was reading this interesting request Continuous View - Scrivener Like when I realized that another cool sorting option for a flat file explorer would be an order that matches that of the files as contained within the regular folder based file explorer. Of course this would be affected by the sorting method that was being used, including custom sort, if it is implemented.

Also useful would be an option to show all folders in the sidebar, without the files.

[edit: https://github.com/ozntel/file-tree-alternative does it]

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At the moment I’m using a combination of “Make.md” and “Recent files” to get what what I want. With Make.md I’ve created a space the shows markdown files. But that can only be sorted either by created time, or alphabetically, and there’s no way to limit the number of files it shows.

Recent files fills in the blanks by showing the most recently opened files, and being able to limit the amount of files shown. Although it only shows files that were opened after the plugin is installed.

I think ideally I’d make a plugin that combines the elements I like of the two, but I’ve only just started using obsidian so I haven’t gotten around to playing with that yet.

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