Integrate the functionality of the community plugin Folder Notes into Obsidian as a core feature.
Motivation
Many users — including myself — structure their vaults by topic-based folders. Having each folder automatically linked to a note with the same name (as Folder Notes does) makes vault navigation much more intuitive and cohesive. This connection turns each folder into both a logical and conceptual node within the vault.
Currently, using Folder Notes as a community plugin works well but feels like functionality that belongs in the core app. Folders naturally serve as containers for related content, and turning them into linkable notes opens up powerful new workflows.
Benefits
Improved organization: Every folder automatically has its own overview note, keeping structure and content closely connected.
Enhanced linking: Folders can be directly linked just like notes, enabling true cross‑connections between folder topics.
Better conceptual mapping: This mirrors how users think about their knowledge domains—each folder as both a topic and a space for related notes.
Smoother integration: As a core plugin, the feature could be more tightly integrated and stable, avoiding small bugs that sometimes occur with the community version (for example, folders not appearing bold anymore after adding a new subfolder without renaming).
Consistent user experience: Reduces dependency on community plugins for what many users already treat as a fundamental organizational pattern.
Vision
If each folder could act both as a directory and as a note entity, users could:
Build connections between folders similar to links between notes.
Treat folders almost like tags, allowing for overlapping hierarchy structures (e.g., one folder conceptually belonging to multiple parent folders).
Maintain a cleaner, more semantic vault without duplicating summary notes manually.
Conclusion
Making Folder Notes a core plugin would empower users to organize, navigate, and connect their vaults more seamlessly, while ensuring better performance and native reliability. It would bring structure and meaning perfectly together in one feature.
Concept of a note that may contain note(s) very ubiquitous among modern editors. I think this should be considered as extension of obsidian flavored markdown with some “folder notes links” (even if part of this not meant for markup).
How “folder notes links” should work from my perspective: instead of writing [[link/to/folder-note/folder-note]] we may just write this with an additional slash [[link/to//folder-note]].
This should be extension of standard, not “just a plugin”.
+1, and this would replace the page/subpage/subpage structure that we have in many other tools (Notion, Coda, Fibery…) that otherwise become not possible (or with overhead)
I’d love if you could click on a folder and see a page similar to Notes.
Use case or problem
I use Obsidian for a lot of my Dungeons & Dragons notes. I have notes on all the locations in the setting, sorted into folders based on what country they’re in.
Using real-world examples: USA folder, with California, Oregon, etc notes inside it. I’d love to click USA and be able to edit the country right there instead of having to make a USA note.
Proposed solution
I’d love to be able to click on the country folder and add notes about the specific country, instead of having to make a separate note page for it. I think it would look a lot cleaner than having a folder and a note named the same thing in the same spot!
Current workaround (optional)
Right now I just make a new note page and put it in the same spot as the folder (or sometimes I’ll put it inside the folder with the same name) but it ends up looking messy that way.
I apologize if this is already posted somewhere or if it’s posted with the wrong tags, I did search the forums and didn’t find anything!
No, thanks. A folder is a folder, not a document. If you want to put notes on a folder itself, there’s a plugin that already adds a note to a folder: Folder Notes
Markdown is note based. There are far better ways to “containerize” notes - tags and the other neglected, but powerful, metadata in properties and, the most powerful of all → links.
Your folders won’t disappear or become folder notes automatically.. I think you’re missing the point: these will be three distinct entities - notes, folders, and folder-notes. Users will be able to toggle between them. It’s about giving an option, not forcing a change on everyone.
This topic about to make this functional core, not for a plugin (even this is titled as “core plugin“). Folders won’t disappear or changes, people just could create native folder notes and have better integration with Obsidian. This will give native flexibility and make structure more robust. You choose your own fashion of your vault, your folders in your vault will remain intact
@Marionette If you don’t like the idea don’t turn on the plugin. Others do like the idea and have a third party plugin that may or may not be around this time next year is not out of the realm to ask for.
Remember, Obsidian allows you to turn off plugins and functionality you do not want yet still allowing others to use that function.
Implementing the concept of ‘Objects’ (similar to https://capacities.io/ ‘s implementation) could be a more elegant solution, albeit a different approach to what’s proposed here
I haven’t really explained why I’m against this, so it sounds like I’m just against it because “change bad” or some such. That’s my fault, and I apologize.
The reason I’m against this is that, to do it properly, it will affect everyone else. The Obsidian dev team would need to change how Obsidian’s directory system interacts with Electron. This change to the underlying structure wouldn’t be something you could toggle on or off, you’d have to do a full uninstall and reinstall of a completely different version. The part that gets toggled would only be the part that’s visible. This could introduce stability and security risks into a system that’s already somewhat notorious for stability and security risks (Electron, not Obsidian).
If the Obsidian team went with a hackish version similar to how existing plugins work, I wouldn’t care, but it wouldn’t really be a good way of doing it, and would be closer to a “dirty hack” than “clean code”. It would be rather fragile. I’m honestly surprised Folder Notes still works, considering it hasn’t been updated in several years.
(For those who are unfamiliar with Electron, it’s the platform that Obsidian is built on. Electron is essentially a scaled-down version of Chrome/Chromium and apps built into Electron are essentially web apps. This is boiling things down quite a bit, but it’s the essentials of it.)
A folder is an operating system object. I has no properties inside of Obsidian, it is simply a reflection of what is in that OS folder. Those are markdown notes and attachments.
How would we distinguish between an OS folder and this new propsed “folder” entity?
Notion, Coda, Fibery are not pure markdown apps; Obsidian core is markdown based. As mentioned earlier there are far more powerful methods of “containerizing” markdown notes. And, forgive me, isn’t it time we moved on from folders; be they file folders or operating system storage containers. The location of a file is kind of moot in this day and age; metadata relieves us of that.
What? Why would it require that? Simplifying slightly: Under the hood, you just have a normal note with the same name as the folder. Everything else is just UX: making the file and folder appear to be the same object in Obsidian.
Why we can’t have this as native function? That plugin works flawlessly, but underneath it use hacks and built on non stable things. Not because it is “bad plugin”, it is good actually and doing its work, but because you can’t implement all folder note functionality with official Obsidian APIs. You should write your own implementation to hide note, click hijack, manipulate dom etc. Do monkey patches. And top of that you have to use unofficial explorer API that are being undocumented.
All this things potentially could breake the plugin (and your file structure) with obsidian updates. This is the reason number one why this feature should be considered in the core.
The second reason is the deeper integration with the Obsidian app. The plugin works only with explorer part and don’t have representation with other parts of the Obsidian (such as breadcrumbs, links, graph etc). This is mostly all UI-sugar things too but you can’t do theese things with the plugin realm (for aforementioned reasons), you either should write more monkey patches (=more instability) or even can’t do this at all.
Even if you could do this with all official APIs this still remain wrong and brittle, because file structuring your vault is essential thing and you shoundn’t rely this part on the plugins. I believe technically there isn’t hard to implement all that natively (and definitely problem not with Electron). Only Obsidian devs have “keys” for that.