I’m trying to navigate to the left sidebar in the vault selection menu with my arrow keys, but I haven’t been able to figure out how. When I press tab I can cycle through the buttons on the right (Create a new vault, open folder as vault, open vault from sync), but I can’t figure out how to jump over to the left panel to open an existing vault. I’ve seen some older posts that made it seem like this just wasn’t possible, but it seems like an important accessibility feature so I was wondering if anyone knows how to do this (either out-of-box or with plugins/workarounds).
My current workaround is to use the obsidian://open?vault=NAME syntax in a shortcut to access my vaults directly, but I would really prefer to select my vaults from the menu inside of Obsidian.
I’m also just generally curious–if navigating like this isn’t possible, then how would someone with a screen reader use Obsidian?
Things I have tried
I searched through old forum posts, and while I did see some where people were trying to do something similar with the file browser, I didn’t see any for navigating the vault selection menu. Also a lot of those posts were fairly old, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that they’re out of date and this is possible now.
Keyboard navigation for the left tool bar isn’t needed since these icons correspond to commands found in the command palette which is accessed by pressing Cmd + P. For example if you search “vault” in the command palette, you will find “Open another vault” command which is highlighted first in the list.
You can pin commands to the command palette. When you open the command palette, your first pinned command is highlighted. Then you press down and up keyboard keys to navigate between your pinned commands in the command palette.
Oh nice, QuickSwitcher++ was exactly what I needed! Incidentally I’ve also been looking for a way to jump to headers which is a great bonus.
I can’t figure out how to get the command palette to let me switch between vaults using only keyboard navigation, though–if I use it to run the “Open another vault” command, I’m presented with the same vault-switching menu that was giving me trouble in the first place. I can navigate the buttons on the right to switch between creating a new vault and opening a vault from a folder, but I can’t figure out how to jump over to the left column to actually select a vault. At this point it doesn’t matter too much since QuickSwitcher++ does exactly what I need it to do, but I am still curious if anyone knows whether that that sort of navigation is possible in vanilla Obsidian.
I suppose one vanilla workaround for this could be using the “open folder as vault” button to manually navigate the file explorer to the vault you want because you CAN navigate to that one, but that’s not very convenient.
Another example of this is that I can use the command palette/hotkey to open the settings menu, but I can’t figure out how to jump over to the left column in the settings menu to select which settings category I want to edit.