Import/Export settings

Use case or problem

I use Obsidian with multiple vaults and multiple computers. I have customized many Obsidian hotkeys and I also use several plugins, but keeping all these settings in sync between vaults and computers is error prone and time-consuming.

Proposed solution

All these solutions are complementary, not mutually exclusive:

  1. Add Import/Export settings buttons that generate/accept a file with all the options specified in the Settings panels (ideally including enabled/disabled plugins, but if this is too hard just hotkeys would be great). This would also help me keep my settings backed up in the same folder where I have settings files for other apps (e.g. iTerm, Visual Studio Code).

  2. Make Obsidian Sync optionally synchronize settings across computers.

  3. (Most important long-term imo) Differentiate between Vault-specific and App-wide settings and make hotkeys App-wide. I don’t think letting people set different hotkeys for different vaults is a good idea because of how muscle-memory works and for consistency with other apps (I have never seen an app where hotkeys are not shared between “documents” (“Vaults” in Obsidian’s case).

  4. Set default hotkeys for most commonly-used actions (e.g. split vertically, horizontally, etc). I already suggested this before because of all its advantages (least work for users, consistent with other apps, etc).

Current workaround (optional)

Ideal workaround: Every time you change a hotkey or setting, get out of the note-taking flow and think of all the vaults you have over all the computers and either change them all or take a note to do it later which never happens).

When the first workaround doesn’t work (because I forget to apply the change): use menus or icons to do certain operations when I press the hotkey and this time it doesn’t work because it’s the wrong vault and get frustrated.

9 Likes

I also would like to synchronize my settings. I work on multiple devices like Android and Apple. The settings seem to be the same anyways. Why not sync it with the vault (or another specified folder)?

I guess I have found what I was looking for. In the Vault Folder is a subfolder called “.obsidian” that includes all the themes, settings for my daily notes and plugins that I wanted to have synchronized. I just have to make sure to let my synching app also sync hidden folders beginning whit a dot.

I don’t understand this FR, the settings are files in .obsidian, why not just copy them?
There’s nothing to export.

1 Like

Would this work when trying to export settings from Desktop to iOS?

The current solution isn’t ideal:

  • It forces me to understand the structure of a hidden folder.
  • It’s limited compared to existing “app settings patterns”.

As a programmer, I’m weary of copying dot folders because they sometimes contain more than just settings. e.g. they could sensitive data like .git folders, or they could contain vault-specific cached data like the “Recent Files” Obsidian plugin does (a minor confusing problem I faced earlier today.)

Tools for more technically-savvy users, like iTerm2 for Mac, provide an option to import and export settings. And being able to cleanly export settings would make it easier to version-control them. The best solution imo, would still be to have app-wide settings like many apps do (e.g. VSCode): I still regularly waste time manually synching settings between vaults because I’ve changed a keyboard shortcut in one of my vaults, but I forgot to apply it on the others. And I still have issues with my wife because we share a vault and we can’t have proper cross-device settings that are user-specific (if we both check “Sync settings”, she will get my settings, and if she changes them, she’s changing them for me.)