Focusing on a Subfolder in an Obsidian Vault

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In my Vault, I have many folders, and some of them have very deep nested subfolders, for example:
vault/a/b/c/d/e.

Sometimes I want to focus only on editing the folder e, and I don’t want to see anything outside of this folder in the Files pane.

My first idea was to open folder e as a separate Vault, using another Obsidian window to work on it. However, this approach has a downside: Obsidian will create a new .obsidian configuration folder inside e, which is a bit annoying.

I would then have to either reconfigure everything from scratch, or copy the configuration from the original Vault. In both cases, this means storing an extra copy of the configuration files, which feels wasteful.

So I came up with another solution: using symbolic links to link the original Vault’s configuration folder into the subfolder e. This takes almost no extra disk space and allows the subfolder Vault to fully inherit all settings from the original Vault.

ln -s /path/to/vault/.obsidian /path/to/vault/a/b/c/d/e/.obsidian

The bad news is that Templates no longer work correctly, because the Templates feature is configured using a folder path. Unless I also symlink the templates folder into the subfolder Vault, templates won’t be available.

Fortunately, symlinking the templates folder does work:

ln -s /path/to/vault/templates /path/to/vault/a/b/c/d/e/templates

I then wrote a small script that only requires me to input the target path, and it will automatically symlink both the original Vault’s configuration and the templates folder into that subfolder.

In the end, I achieved my goal: focusing on a subfolder inside Obsidian.

I think this is a very practical workflow, and I hope Obsidian could support something like this natively in the future—for example, a button that lets the Files pane display only the folder I want to focus on.

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