Open different vault in same window?

Feature requests
21

If it is difficult to implement, I think we can find some ways to distinguish the 2 obsidian instances. e.g., use different desktop or taskbar icons for different vaults.

22

I have two main vaults. One uses the Minimal theme in the (mostly) default colors and another uses AnuPpuccin with a colorful scheme. Very easy to have both open and tell the two apart instantly.

23

I have a fairly concrete example of why Iā€™d like two vaults in one interface. Iā€™ve just set up one passworded & encrypted vault for confidential client notes. However Iā€™d also like to occasionally crosscheck or copy in the publicly available info or links I have stored in my ā€œeverythingā€ vault.

I expect itā€™ll cause problems to have a single vault with a subfolder that gets encrypted and decrypted throughout the day.

24

How is it different from putting notes in separating folders but under the same vault?

Notes in folders are prefixed with a folder name in the Quick Access (Ctrl+O) dialog. Personally, I donā€™t like it.

25

This is not an answer on how to open your vault in same window.
In my situation I have a single vault shared over GIT with my work computer. I do not share any personal notes on my work computer at all, and notes stay in sync with my main branch/vault.

How?
In GIT thereā€™s a thing called ā€œsparse-checkoutā€, which allows you to only checkout certain folders or files even, and track them locally. This enables me to keep a separate set of work related notes in a separate folder in my vault.

How to:

  • Create a folder on your work computer where you want to store your Obsidian work notes.
  • Open terminal and type:
cd FOLDER_NAME
git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 --sparse --filter=blob:none ssh://git@URL-TO-YOUR-REPO-HOST:YOUR-REPO/obsidian-vault.git .

This will add a git repo to your folder, but not download anything. Yet.
Now, in your terminal you need to add the folders you want to track from your repository.

git sparse-checkout init --cone
git sparse-checkout add /FOLDER/  # trailing / said important
cat .git/info/sparse-checkout   # to verify

git checkout main  # should take only a moment

git status
    On branch $BRANCH
    Your branch is up to date with 'origin/$BRANCH'.

    You are in a sparse checkout with '2%' of tracked files present.

    nothing to commit, working tree clean
git add . --sparse # To check in untracked local files

This assumes you are using GIT on your vault of course. I use Obsidian-GIT plugin to update from within my Obsidian.

This way, I can keep my notes updated from work without sharing my personal notes on work computers. And all my notes are synced to my main single vault.

Not the simplest of solutions, but it is the best for now. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
26

I would also like to bump this feature request. I use Obsidian for my personal notes, and are now using Obsidian for my school notes that are backed by github and shared between some classmates.

I cannot share my personal notes with my classmates, so this usage requires two vaults. Iā€™m not a huge fan of having multiple windows because that would require me to set two different themes, otherwise Iā€™d constantly be confused on which one is which. Iā€™m also not a fan of cmd+~ to switch between instances of applications.

It would make more sense to be able to open multiple vaults in the same window, and switch between them with the standard cmd+shift+[ and cmd+shift+].

I suppose that means youā€™d probably want to move the Theme settings into a global preferences store, and have an option for per-vault themes that switch when you switch vaults (performance issue on load times maybe? Though I bet you can just cache itā€¦)

Anywho, Iā€™d love this feature :slight_smile:

27

Would also like to jump on this bandwagon - I use Obsidian for D&D and am currently running multiple vault for different campaigns.

Having multiple Vaults listed in the navigation pane under their respective headings would mean that I could also centralize my system reference documents in another separate vault, rather than having to have a copy inside each vault in order to generate statblocks etc correctly.

As it is I could have everything in one vault, but that would mean all those folders would appear pretty close to one another and I may accidentally end up working in the wrong one.