It’s a little bit disappointing, that global settings is not a thing. I’m just started out with Obsidian and like it a lot so far, but I use several vaults and redoing all settings is really troublesome.
For example, I’m using customized community plugins and need to change the same settings over and over again (and redownload them first). Also, I want to see i.e. line numbers in every vault and need to activate them again and again.
I’d highly appreciate some sort of global settings to streamline my working flow and my preffered app behaviour. Even a possibility to import settings from an existing vault would be fine to me, that’d ease the trouble of ticking the same boxes for every vault already a lot.
Data point to consider: I’ve tried syncing the .obsidian folder in the past using DropBox, and – for me at least – it seems to cause more problems than it solves. It does keep the plugins and settings synced, but it also syncs the workspace and cache, which in my opinion should be instance-specific. Worst of all, because .obsidian is a high-traffic folder, DropBox would often create conflicted copies of files, creating hard-to-find bugs in behavior and data.
Yes, though I think Selective Sync only works at the folder level. I don’t think you can tell DropBox to, say, sync your .obsidian/plugins folder but not the .obsidian/workspace file. Still, it’s probably worth a shot to see if it works well for you.
SyncThing, which is free and open-source, does support file or folder exclusions. And plus doesn’t even need the cloud since it can just sync two folders on your local machine and run in the background at all times.
Please please please don’t pollute the home directory. Following an open-source standard and using the XDG Base Directory structure to store user-level files. Every OS has this idea as a way of avoiding home directory pollution. If Obsidian were an open source project I would expect these types of options available:
Path
Description
XDG_CONFIG_HOME/obsidian
User-level configuration options found in the current vault-level files appearance.json, app.json, community-plugins.json, core-plugins.json, graph.json, hotkeys.json.
XDG_DATA_HOME/obsidian
This directory should hold the downloaded data for all plugins and themes. The path vault/.obsidian/plugins/... seems an inappropriate place for this data.
vault/.obsidian
Vault-level overrides and extensions to those at the user level.
Optionally, having flags to override these values when calling the Obsidian binary would be helpful in creating one-off vault configurations. Something like:
I’ve read a lot of these topics to understand the developer’s rationale and I’m still confused. Per-vault settings are inane. Do we really have to write out use cases and justifications for something so obviously needed?
I see this is still not implemented. Just created 4 new vaults and I wanted the settings from the first one copied across with plugins etc. However when i copy the .obsidian directory the new new vaults have the notes listed from the first vault which is NOT what i wanted. Which of the many files in the .obsidian directory lists the notes so i leave that one out from the copy?
I use a File/Folder Comparison/Sync app (DeltaWalker because I happen to have a license, but it’s not very intuitive) between my main vault and other vaults.
In appearance.json, I copy everything except the line cssTheme because I want to have different themes so I can quickly distinguish the vaults. (You could just keep the accentColor different instead)
getting back here. since i have a few new vaults, and i forgot to copy all Hotkeys … but i don’t remember which vault was the original source one … so i have 12 vaults each with different hotkeys
Symlinking things under the .obsidian/ directory in order to share them between vaults has a high chance of corrupting your settings, unless you really really know what you’re doing. If you decide to go this way, at least have backups.
I just need someone who really really knows the configs!
Done anyone know such guy?
A list of all things/configs (inside .obsidian) that are safe to symlink between vaults would be much appreciated.
But make a backup first! 
