Ignore/exclude completely files or a folder from all obsidian indexers and parsers

Feature requests
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43

Nope, the lower directory is only read-only from the context of the overlay mount directory :slight_smile:

Some key points:

  • Use the Obsidian vault as the lower directory
  • Keep using Obsidian via the lower directory directly
  • Create “invisible” files/directories via the overlay mount

In the overlay mount, you have the identical directory structure and the same files as in the Obsidian vault, but you are free to create new files and directories which will only be stored in the “upper” directory

The overlay mount is basically just a merged version of the lower/upper directories, and any changes you make in the overlay mount will only be made in the upper directory

Example:

Let’s say you have a vault, named FooVault at ~/FooVault

You would keep using Obsidian directly on ~/FooVault

Create the following directories for the upper/work dirs:
~/FooVault.diff
~/FooVault.work

These directories are to be used by the overlay mount, but you would generally not access them directly. Just create them for now.

Then you want a directory through which you would be able to create directories and files within the context of the vault, but without actually being stored in the vault. Let’s just go with:

~/foo

After creating the ~/FooVault.diff, ~/FooVault.work and ~/foo directories you run:

sudo mount -t overlay overlay -o “lowerdir=$HOME/FooVault,upperdir=$HOME/FooVault.diff,workdir=$HOME/FooVault.work” ~/foo

Let’s say that within FooVault you have a directory such as:

~/FooVault/Projects/Bar

Within this directory you have a bunch of notes and other things related to the Bar project.

This directory and all the files will also be visible at:

~/foo/Projects/Bar

Let’s now say that you have a GIT repo with source code related to the Bar project, you can now store this in:

~/foo/Projects/Bar/src

Under the hood, this will create:

~/FooVault.diff/Projects/Bar/src

When you are using your terminal/IDE/whatever, you’ll access it via the overlay mount at ~/foo, which will see everything combined from both ~/FooVault and ~/FooVault.diff

But when you are using Obsidian (+ in case you want to edit notes or reorganize your vault using any other tool) you would do it via ~/FooVault directly and not via ~/foo

The main thing to keep in mind, besides doing things that should be “invisible” to Obsidian within ~/foo and making any modifications to the vault itself (adding/editing notes, moving vault folders around) via ~/FooVault, is that in case you want to do something like:

Moving ~/FooVault/Projects/Bar to ~/FooVault/Projects/SomethingElse

From the context of the overlay mount at ~/foo you would now have

~/foo/Projects/Bar/src (mapped to ~/FooVault.diff/Projects/Bar/src) as well as ~/foo/Projects/SomethingElse

So to account for that, in case you’re moving folders around in ~/FooVault you need to move them in ~/FooVault.diff as well

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