Obsidian as a kind of flexible and personalized File Explorer

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Now I’m wondering about the combination of the following features that have already been implemented, or features that could be implemented:

  • Obsidian’s lack of attachment to a specific storage location – the ability to open individual files located anywhere on the computer
  • Bases
  • The ability to assign properties to files of any type (Property support for non-markdown files ?)
  • Indexing of all hard drive content, as with third-party alternative search systems with their own indexing (Everything, DocFetcher, Recoll, etc.), not just Markdown files

… can help use Obsidian as a kind of flexible and personalized File Explorer. This, of course, does not quite match to its original purpose, but this seems to be just one of the possible uses that is sorely lacking, and for which there still seems to be no alternative solutions – File Explorer-type software seems to be very limited.

For example, if there is a folder with books on a computer, it is possible to create a .bases file in this folder, filter the files for the contents of this folder, assign the desired Properties to the books files, and be able to open this .bases file to view the catalog of all books as a separate file.

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@untitled
If you’re looking for a powerful file manager with Everything integration, check out Directory Opus. I use this alongside Obsidian for file management/ renaming etc

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Thank you very much for the advice.

For me, the main problem with this type of software is its unreliability in terms of data storage. I mean, categorizing all files and keeping them in order requires a lot of work, and if something happens to the software, I simply won’t be able to transfer all my assigned Properties to another software, or perhaps even another operating system (I have wanted to switch from Windows to NixOS for a long time, but so far this has not been possible) – and as far as I know, Directory Opus is only supported on Windows.

Otherwise, for the use case I described, there are options that seem more reliable (but still not enough) – TagSpaces and Eagle.

In general, the default File Explorer that comes with Windows is sufficient for me – I try to use the simplest tools possible and not overload my approach with anything complex or specific. In rare cases, I have to resort to XYPlorer – it always helps me out in a variety of situations, and it’s quite intuitive.

It’s just that… there is still no way to assign Properties to all files and display them as Bases – this functionality is not available anywhere. And Obsidian is reliable enough for me to do all the necessary work without fear that the result of this work will be completely lost.

(To rename files, I use Bulk Rename Utility)

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