Global Settings

[b3u]

Like, optionally using the user config dir as a default for vault settings.

[rsdimitrov]

One use case:
I’d like to have my hotkeys across vaults, but not necessarily keep the same theme per vault. I’m the same user, using the same app, it is just that the content has been changed. Now I have to manually move my config file and I realize that the moment my muscle memory fires, but there is no response from the app.

Also having some plug-ins on and off for certain vaults would be useful.

So, to elaborate—some parts of the settings should be per vault, others should be “per user”.

[Somnesis]

This is huge! I have to manually set the same shortcut keys and preferences over and over again for each vault. No fun!

[nixsee]

I would also like to see Global Settings. Now that v0.76 has separate config and workspace files, could the workspace one be made into a centralized/global/default settings that applies to all vaults, or at the very least applies to new vaults?

[JoeyKC]

Yeah, if the settings include editer,plugings,hotkeys and so on can be export or import, can reduce a lot time to reset in other vaults.

[HerbCaudill]

+1 - I got bit by this in my first walk-through - I was going through the Obsidian Help vault and playing with things, and I added some keyboard shortcuts and tweaked a few settings. Then I went to my own vault and it was all gone; took me a bit to find where the Help vault was stored in my file system, so I could just grab the config file from there!

[DuyNgee]

Is there any update regarding this feature? It is kind of redundant to copy configs from vault to vault.

[lucasrla]

I second this feature request.

Manually checking and copying the same settings to every new vault I create is time consuming and kind of frustrating…

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Edit: Oh, I just realized that simply copying the .obsidian/config file works just fine.

In other words, there is no need to navigate across every single config option as I had been doing (doh!)… Simply copy the .obsidian/config file from an old vault to a new one and, voila, you now have the same configs.

[DuyNgee]

Is there any issue with copying the cache and workspace files from one vault to another? Just making sure there won’t be any complications later on.

[agam]

Enjoying Obsidian so far, thank you (and all the best too !)

I ended up making two vaults (I usually end up with at least two namespaces in all my tools, at the very least I always have a “life vs work” separation (or I try to, lol)).

I wanted to add a hot-key for “Today’s notes” and it was super-easy to do this, really like how straightforward it was.

However, I then had to go add it for the other vault too, after wondering “why isn’t this keyboard shortcut working anymore?” for a while.

And … this made me wonder, should hotkeys be global or vault-scoped?.

I can see the case for keeping it the way it is: (1) there might be hotkeys that only make sense for a specific vault, or (2) it allows the app to not have any global state.

On the other hand, hotkeys are usually for the app as a whole; the way I imagine them, I add or change hotkeys when I want to change “the way I use the app”.

So: not a complaint, just a thought, thanks again for a great product.

[Cito]

One idea would be to support configuration on different levels (e.g. per user, per vault) similar to how it is done in Git where you can overwrite the user configuration per repository. In Obsidian, the per-vault configuration would overwrite the per-user configuration.

[santi]

This would be great, ideally it’d be great to have one dotfile generated only for the hotkeys, this file could easily be shared accross vaults and to other people.

Currently, what I do to share my hotkeys accross vaults is to copy the .obsidian file (a hidden file in the vault)

this not only copies hotkeys, but also all settings, such as plugins and editor settings.

This is a workaround and I’m still not sure if I’m missing downsides to this approach.

In mac, for showing this hidden file in finder, go to your folder of the vault that has the shorcuts and press

Cmd + Shift + .

now you can copy this file to your other vault.

If you are in Windows or linux just search “how to show hidden files or dotfiles”

hope that helps, I’d love to know if there’s a better approach

[Dor]

afaics each vault is a separate instance. I don’t think there’s much that’s ‘global’.

[Cito]

@Dor

I don’t think there’s much that’s ‘global’.

Yes, but as I suggested above, Obsidian could e.g. support a per user hotkey configuration in ~user/.obsidian in addition to vault/.obsidian. Each vault’s instance would first lookup the per user configuration and then merge in the configuration from its vault. Of course, global configurations could also be stored under /etc or in the Windows registry.

[ristomatti]

Hi all! I just installed Obsidian today by the recommendation from a colleague. So far it looks great but I’ve ran across a few annoyances, this being one. I spent a considerable amount of getting the shortcuts right for me. I was quite surprised to find the shortcuts didn’t work in the “help vault”.

As already suggested, it would be great if one could define global settings under ~/.obsidian or ~/.config/obsidian which could then be overriden by the vault specific settings. Then again this complicates things as it wouldn’t then be straightforward to edit global/default settings vs. vault specific. It would require something like VSCode’s settings management.

For me the keyboard shortcuts matter the most. It would already help if the keyboard shortcuts would be defined in a separate file from config. This way you could create a symlink to this file between projects (as a workaround).

[santi]

I agree, @ristomatti specially with what you said on making the shortcuts a separate config file. This way it can easily be shared with others (and across vaults) without having to copy the whole .obsidian directory.

And like you said, from there symlinks could be created without any issues.

[rogeric]

Is there any solution to restore default setting for hotkeys?

[anubhavcodes]

Came here looking for a solution for global settings, saw this thread. +1 to this feature.

[fcy]

Same here, I’m starting out and only have 2 vaults and the frustration of “why isn’t this working I already changed the hotkey (or some other editor setting)” has already bitten me.

A home directory to store the global settings that are overridable by each vault setting sounds great to me.

[nixsee]

I’d like to expand this to include Plugins, CSS etc… It seems to me that all of this should be stored in a global obsidian repository, and then vault-level preferences select/apply what is wanted/needed. If I’m not mistaken, VS Code is basically like this - Extensions, Themes, Settings etc… get applied per Workspace.

As it stands, I have different plugin versions installed in different vaults, when you’d think that updates would be applied globally (along with being able to select which plugins are turned on for each vault, and how their settings are configured in each as well)