Notes Explorer : Explore your notes in masonry and grid view

[Tu2_atmanand]

Heyo all!

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

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 !

GitHub - tu2-atmanand/obsidian-notes-explorer: Plugin for Obsidian.md. Explore your notes as...

[Tu2_atmanand]

Recent Big Features

• 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.

[sunk8]

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!

[Tu2_atmanand]

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.

[Tu2_atmanand]

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

Notes Explorer plugin - Page View (Big feature)

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

[CharlieP]

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

[Tu2_atmanand]

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!

[peeragetalkers]

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!

[Tu2_atmanand]

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.

[Tu2_atmanand]

Notes Explorer v2.5.0

This version brings the following new features and bug fixes :

• Open notes explorer in left sidebar : A new command to easily open notes explorer in left sidebar.

• Open in same tab : A new option for the Open note layout setting to open your notes in the same tab. (Only works if Notes Explorer is inside left sidebar)

• Changed the behavior for opening note in right side tab. All the notes will open on the right side tab by re-using the same opened, right split tab, instead of splitting the view all the time.

• If you want the plugin to behave similar to File Explorer, use the Open notes explorer in the left sidebar, and you will be able to use CTRL, CTRL+ALT and CTRL+ALT+SHIFT shortcuts to open notes in different layouts.

• New setting to choose, double click or single click to open the note from the card.

• Images will be now aligned to center inside the cards.

• The height is too small when there is only one or two rows. Fixed

• Checkboxes do not appear inside the cards. Fixed

• The Notes Explorer tab header do not show the plugin icon correctly. Fixed

Release notes : Release 2.5.0 · tu2-atmanand/obsidian-notes-explorer · GitHub

[xyz123]

I’m having an issue where if a note includes both ‘ABC’ and ‘DEF’, a search for ‘ABC DEF’ fails to find it. However, if I search for just ‘ABC’ or just ‘DEF’, it shows up. Additionally, searching for ‘ABC DEF’ gives me different results than searching for ‘DEF ABC’.

[Tu2_atmanand]

@xyz123 what you are trying to achieve can be only possible through search filters. Because whatever you will search as a normal content, it will be treated as a single continuous string. But if I understand your query correctly you are trying to use it as search engine, like Google, which treats each of you word separately and tries to match the the word inside the file content if atleast one of the word is matched or not.

I have almost completed the search filters here : FR : Search Filters inside the search bar · Issue #9 · tu2-atmanand/obsidian-notes-explorer · GitHub

From these filters you can use the content: filter to achieve what you have explained above. You will be required to use either one or two content filters as compulsory filters. For example : content: ABC AND/OR content: DEF.

These search filters will be released in the upcoming version, v2.6.0. Ill explain the AND, OR logical filters in a YouTube video maybe.

Also your query has given me this new feature idea to make the search functionality work similar to the search engines. Right now I am using the default Obsidian FuzzySearch engine. Maybe I’ll try to see if it’s possible to implement the individually search every word functionality.

[Tu2_atmanand]

Notes Explorer v2.6.0 | Search Filters

Notes Explorer 2.6.0 | Search Filters and much more

Hello Everyone!

Notes Explorer has been released in the Obsidian market a few weeks ago. But I wanted to announce about it with this new version as I had some big features planned. This release has brought very important features which will definitely make your notes’ exploration journey smoother and enjoyable.

Following are some highlighted new features:

• Search filters : Apply various kinds of filters to the view to find your notes faster directly from the search bar.
• Link filtered views : Use the Obsidian URI links to save the filtered Notes Explorer view for future quick reference.
• New notes viewer : A new modal mode to open the notes for a quick peek. Specially beneficial for mobile version.
• UI optimizations for mobile : A ton of UI/UX enhancements to get a better experience even on small screens.
• Search history : Store your searches to easily apply them in the future.
• New settings to adjust gutter size and surrounding padding.

I’ll be looking forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions to make this notes exploration tool even better. As I don’t have any fixed roadmap for this plugin, any feature which can make this plugin better shall be integrated after proper discussion and are most welcomed.

I am really grateful to the Obsidian dev team and all the ones from #plugin-dev channel on Discord, who has helped me in resolving my doubts with no time. I was able to complete these features much faster because of all of their help.

Watch the above demo video to understand the new features effectively.

Don’t forget to give a on GitHub!

[xyz123]

Hello
Can I use the “AND, OR, NOT, parentheses” operators in the search box?
If not, please add them.

[Tu2_atmanand]

Hi @xyz123 !

It would be great if you could explain what you are trying to search with one example. Right now I am assuming, you are only trying to search the content. If yes, then I think this feature might be useful but not the way you have described it. For example, if say a user want to search for two words “Hello” and “world”. But these two words need not be together, that is, even if these two words are present in the note at different locations, still the note should be returned in the results. I am working on improving the basic search bar to achieve this.

But, if you are trying to use the AND, OR and NOT functionalities for properties, like tags, created-date, etc. Then you already can achieve this using the Normal filters (NF) and Compulsory filters (CF), that is by using the lock icon on the filters, which makes them compulsory (AND operation).

But the NOT, functionality is not achievable as of now, thank you for suggesting it, will implement it soon.

[Tu2_atmanand]

Notes Explorer v2.7.0 | Folder view

Hello Everyone!

Notes Explorer v2.7.0 has been released with a lot of enhanced UI elements and a very interesting feature called Folder view to use this plugin as a grid view file explorer (currently limited to only few file types.). I actually wanted to show the folder as cards to get better understanding of the folder structure, but then ended up creating a complete file explorer with a folder navigation bar in the header as well.

Following are some highlighted new features:

• Folder View : Show the children folder as cards and navigate the directories using these folder cards and top navigation bar.
• Improved a lot of UI elements to reduce visual noise and give an aesthetic look.
• Toggle search input field only when required.
• A new RegEx filter inside search filters to use the power of regular expressions.
• Enhanced refresh on tab or window resize with smoother animation.
• Real-time card content refresh on file edit.

Thank you to all those who has helped me with reporting the test the features and bugs and reaching out to me on various platforms to share your valuable feedback and ideas.

I’ll be looking forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions to make this notes exploration tool even better. As I don’t have any fixed roadmap for this plugin, any feature which can make this plugin better shall be integrated after proper discussion and are most welcomed.

Release Notes : Release 2.7.0 · tu2-atmanand/obsidian-notes-explorer · GitHub

Watch this demo video to understand the search filters effectively: https://youtu.be/GEp1inE6H1I

Don’t forget to give a on GitHub!