sometimes it is cool to have different settings for different vaults
sometimes it is cool to be able “switch off” some folders or zoom in some folders.
I think the solution is outside the nested vaults feature.
The first problem can be solved by making profiles of settings. Probably profiles idea can be unified with workspaces.
The second problem is about isolation of the area with which I am currently working on. And it can be solved by idea about folder settings from here:
The only thing remaining is to understand how to make it convenient for user to switch between different profiles / workspaces / modes etc.
My current suggestion is to let user make profiles, which contain preferences:
workspace settings
probably plugin settings
appearance of folders settings etc
And let user switch between profiles with hotkeys like cmd+1, cmd+2, cmd+3.
thus if I want to zoom in specific folder, I user profile 2 (in which only specified folders appear everywhere: in link suggestions, quick open dialog, graph view etc.) and isolate it. If I want to see whole picture, I switch to profile 1 (all folders appear everywhere).
So you work in the only vault and do not have problems of nested vaults.
Bumping this request because I would benefit greatly from a less risky way of partitioning my vault. I currently have all my notes in one vault. Personal notes, all kinds of studies and then a great part of them are directly related to my work. At home, I synchronize all my notes between a laptop and a stationary via Nextcloud and it works relatively well.
Now, at my workplace I have a work computer. I often need to access information from my knowledge base and add to it, but I don’t want to synchronize my whole vault with that computer. Only part of it is relevant to my work and I don’t want to risk the rest of my second brain leaking into an office computer, or even worse, the office cloud server. I only want to synchronize notes relevant to work.
The solution I’m trying now is to make a sub-folder in my vault with all work related notes. Then at work, I synchronize that folder only via Nextcloud (sharing the folder with a second user I’ve made specifically for this). Then I point Obsidian to use that subfolder as a vault, effectively nesting a vault inside a vault from the perspective of my home computer / main vault. I understand there are inherent risks to this and I would if it was less risky. I wish I could offer some constructive ideas, but think those are probably outside my competence, so I just offer this as a concrete use example.
Obsidian designed in a way, that encourages creating more files, rather then larger files
BASES only increase that effect.
this is not a problem in of itself, but there is no support in global filtering/limiting viewed files and so on.
Even Quick switcher can not filter them, beyond de-periodising,
and search queries, dataview queries and everything gets slower with more files.
Current status
I am currently using nested vaults
meaning I have vault one and then one folder inside is an another vault and so on.
it means all files of that vault can be opened in two vaults
that works, but it has flaws, most obvious is that I need to use system links to attach folders beyond the straight tree and so on
Proposed solution
since ability to use Obsidian to open .md files outside of your vault appeared in the roadmap.
it is not impossible to also add ability to define any folder as “sub-vault” and allow to mount it at any number of other vaults
meaning in the obsidian vault selector, there is not only create new vault, but also “register new sub-vault” and so on.
Alternatively
an vault nesting can be supported, allowing one vault include any other vault wholesale, if that is for some reason an easer solution, but that creates a lot unnecessary metadata.
Current workaround
System links do technically allow to do that
but they are system level, hard to maintain, not portable, and do not work across operating systems, a native solution would be much better.