Notes Explorer : Explore your notes in masonry and grid view

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Heyo all!:wave:

I want to share my modifications to the Cards view plugin.

Gallery view (fixed card height)
Gallery view (fixed card height)1420×1004 184 KB

Masonry view (variable card height)
Masonry view (variable card height)1410×990 204 KB

I loved the Cards view plugin when I first time used it, even though I wasn’t a big fan of exploring my notes as gallery view and also because I never used other similar tools like Google notes. But later I found that having the feature to visually explore your note’s content is a great way to revise your creative work and keep all notes organized in different folders and sub-folders. It really helps to get visual understanding of your vault.

I initially created a fork of the original plugin, just to implement a few of the feature Ideas I had in mind and to make it work according to my preferences. But later got more inspired from a few of the feature requests made in the Issues section of Cards view. And that’s when I decided to make these newly added functionalities available to the community instead of hard-coding them, hence I implemented all the functionalities as optional setting options, so users can turn them off, as and when they want.

Even though the initial plan was to give back my contributions to the original plugin. But later I realized that the changes and functionalities I have implemented might not align with the future plans of the Cards view plugin. Hence, I decided to create my own plugin out of this fork : Notes Explorer

Still, ill be contributing to the original plugin, to integrate my implementations. But in Open-source environment, different developers works at their own availability, hence can’t promise anything from my end.

I have submitted the plugin to be published on Obsidian marketplace, but till it gets approved, you can install it using BRAT. Follow these simple steps : How to install Notes Explorer

New features

I have implemented various features, you can check out the changelogs and all the features in detail : Notes Explorer releases

Here are some interesting major features :

  • Setting option to remove the delete button and the footer icons will be only visible on hover.
  • More sorting options to sort based on Created time, file name in either ascending or descending order.
  • Tag Color indicator : The cards will be given a color based on the tags found in the note.
  • New setting option to hide the footer, to get complete card for clean aesthetic look.
  • Open the note on double click instead of the single click, to avoid false clicks on the cards.
  • The view will now update on workspace resize events and a new refresh button.
  • Exclude Folders : Add the folders in setting, to exclude the notes from those folders to be shown on the board.
  • Folder specific board view : Use the right-click menu option for folders from the file explorer to open only the notes from a specific folder. Also use Read sub-folder filter to read all notes from even sub-folders.
  • Board view on folder click : Click on the folder from the file-explorer to see the Note explorer view with all the parent notes.
  • Folder Tag : For the above two features, a folder tag will be shown as an indicator in the action bar.
  • UI/UX for the Tag color indicator has been enhanced to give best experience for configuring the colors and changing the priority of the tags using drag feature.
  • Optimization : Now only the first 20(default) lines will be read instead of reading the whole note. You can change this in settings.
  • Note’s Metadata : Now you can select which property of the note you want to see inside the footer of the card instead of the original parent folder name.
  • Gallery View : Using the new Fixed card height setting option, make all the cards to take fixed height to get a gallery view look.
  • Delete Confirmation popup : A new popup window has been added, so users don’t accidentally delete the notes using the delete icon in the cared footer.
  • Hover preview for parent note: Get a hove preview for the parent note when hovered over the footer of the card while holding CTRL key.
  • Interactions for note’s content : Get hover preview for the internal links from the note’s content, as well as open the internal links directly from the card. Holding CTRL key is important for both the functionalities to work.

Support

I hope you found my contributions helpful!
If you did, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could consider supporting my work through a small donation. Your support helps keep this project alive and encourages further development.

Don’t forget to give a star on GitHub :star:!

GitHub Sponsors

7 Likes
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Recent Big Features

ezgif-4-afd4350bce

  • Hold CTRL key and hover over the footer of the card to get the hover preview of the parent note.
  • Hold CTRL key and hover over the internal links to get the hover preview of those notes.
  • Hold CTRL key and click on the internal embed links to open the note in new tab.

I am using my most favorite plugin, Hover Editor plugin. It has the best feature to get hover preview as well as edit the note directly from the floating preview window itself.

Current Development

Right now, I am working on a solution I have in mind to optimize the plugin for huge vaults. I am working on converting the whole scrolling view into multiple pages, so exploring huge vaults will be smoother. As the original algorithm is giving few problems of freezing the Obsidian itself when scrolled more than 1K cards.

5 Likes
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Hi !
It’s my first time on this forum.

I saw this plugin on GitHub and navigated here.

This plugin looks really promising, man! I had used Cards view, a while back actually, but didn’t stick to it, as I wasn’t using it a lot. But one particular feature I wanted in that plugin was opening notes only from a specific folder.

I saw that you had done a great job implementing the same. Along with that, the amount of features you have additionally added are really impressive. The UI also looks very polished and with the card colors it looks appealing to eyes.

I have installed it through BRAT, but cant wait to see it in the community plugins.

Thank you so much for sharing it!

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Thank you for the kind words!

I am glad I could able to help. And I am pretty sure you will like the other features as well, as you use it more and more.

2 Likes
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My Best Solution

As some users of the Card View plugin or Notes Explorer plugin might have noticed, there was a serious problem with the plugin’s implementation when scrolling through more than a thousand cards.
You can find the detailed discussion about this issue here: GitHub discussion on this issue

From the link above, you can see that I came up with a few approaches to tackle this problem. Some of them appeared to be too complex or not worth implementing. Additionally, I faced limitations in implementing those approaches, and they wouldn’t have been better solutions in terms of user experience (discussed further in the same issue).

After some brainstorming on this matter, I finally decided to proceed with the best approach, which turned out to be an interesting feature. I believe this is the optimal solution to tackle the problem, allowing users to explore thousands of notes without any lag or freezing. The approach involves dividing the single infinite scrolling page into multiple pages (see the video below).

Big New Features in v2.4.0 :partying_face:

Video source : Notes Explorer - YouTube

  • Page View Mode

    • If you are not scrolling through many cards, you can use the plugin as usual. You will also see an indicator in the status bar to show how many cards you’ve scrolled. If scrolling through more than a thousand cards doesn’t cause Obsidian to freeze, and resizing the view still rearranges the cards properly, it means you have a powerful PC and may not need to enable this feature. (Still, take a note of the number, when you start feeling that, you shouldn’t scroll beyond these many cards.)
    • To enable the new Page View Mode, toggle the feature in the settings. You can also set how many cards you want to see on a single page (default is 100). This is entirely up to you. On my laptop, I noticed lag when I set it to ‘1000,’ so I usually keep it below that. (Choose a number below the limit you noted earlier.)

  • Page Bar: A new page bar has been added, which you can open by clicking on the Page: # button in the status bar. You can also use the left and right arrow buttons on either side of the page number to navigate between pages without opening the page bar.

  • Hide Action Bar: A new button in the board header has been added. If you’d like to hide the action bar and get a full-screen, distraction-free view, you can use this button.

Detailed release notes and changelog : Notes Explorer release 2.4.0

Making my Approach even Better

What makes me particularly proud of this approach is that the new feature doesn’t just render cards across multiple pages. It also incorporates the existing feature of loading more cards as you scroll. So, when switching pages, you will initially see only 30 cards rendered on each page. As you scroll through a specific page, more cards will be loaded until the maximum limit you set in the settings is reached. This give the plugin even a smoother experience while navigating.

I have tested this plugin on 20 thousand notes, and it works without any lag!

Surprisingly, I was able to complete this work earlier than expected, which gave me enough time to test it thoroughly and release it just in time for Christmas. I’m proud to announce this feature!

Merry Christmas to all :christmas_tree:

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Thank you so much for working on this. I have been looking for a way to visually explore my notes, and have only just installed it. I have stopped using Evernote, but I liked the way I could see a folder of notes with thumbnails - rather than just a straight list. It does provide an intuitive way of looking at things.
Charles

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Thanks for sharing your feedback. Always inspires me when I get feedback on my work.
Many more features coming up soon, to make the exploring and revising activity of our own creativity adventurous!

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Hey @Tu2_atmanand any updates on your project? It seems that the development has stalled, and the plugin is yet to appear in the Obsidian plugin browser. Shucks, I was excited to give it a try!

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Hii @peeragetalkers !

Thank you for showing interest in my contributions.

Actually, past few months had been very busy with personal as well as my other first plugin Task Board. It was released recently after waiting for a really long time, since there were many submissions. Since, we can only submit one plugin at a time, I have made the submission of this plugin as soon as the Task Board got released.

Also, there are actually too many things on the plate when it comes to Task Board plugin. And for this plugin I was running out of ideas. But few weeks back there were very interesting suggestion/feature requests I have received. And few things have been also planned in the coming release of this plugin.

I will probably going to start implementing few of the most important FRs and bugs soon and will release the next version ASAP.

When you will be able to see this plugin on Obsidian marketplace, that seems to be a question to ponder for the next few weeks, as there are already quite few submissions in the queue. I would greatly appreciate it if users of this plugin could show some support in my submission or here, so the review passes without any hurdle.

Submission for this plugin : Add plugin : Notes Explorer by tu2-atmanand · Pull Request #5540 · obsidianmd/obsidian-releases · GitHub

Thank you all for trying out this plugin, even in its beta release and sharing your feedback. Always excited to hear your thoughts and to finally see this plugin make its way to Obsidian marketplace.

1 Like