I was looking the same feature, just open a dialog and select the vault.
The link that offers @jokysatria to help us has changed and is Using obsidian URI
I was looking the same feature, just open a dialog and select the vault.
The link that offers @jokysatria to help us has changed and is Using obsidian URI
So one can now change between the setting being “open last vault” and “show me vault menu to select a vault to open”?
If yes, where? can’t seem to find it.
What was added/changed was these two items:
- On macOS, closing the last vault and re-activating Obsidian will now re-open the last vault instead of opening the vault switcher.
- On macOS, quitting and restarting the app will properly restore the opened vaults.
So, no setting or customization on how Obsidian starts up.
For the record, I’d love a preference for showing the Vault Chooser on startup rather than “Last Obsidian Vault that was closed” as the current way makes startup depend on how you shut down your Obsidian Vaults before.
Feature: A toggleable switch that lets me have the Open Vault window open on app launch.
Why: I’m currently trying to build a system for my university work whereby I have each of my courses as a separate vault (due to how totally unrelated they are), as well as maintain a personal vault for my own information. It would be really useful I could have the “open vaults” window open on startup.
An upcoming release will include URL scheme support, such that you can create links to different vaults by writing a link like so: obsidian://vault/Math
or obsidian://vault/Physics%20and%20Chemistry
—or even to a specific note.
You could then put those links elsewhere to create your own menu. Would this fix your issue?
As a user of multiple vaults, it would be great to be able to open the app and choose between the vaults right away instead of opening whichever one happened to be last opened.
There are already a few settings on the launch window like language, adding a checkbox that says “open to launch window every time” would do wonders for my day-to-day workflow.
Maybe this is related with your feature request:
So, for those who want start obsidian with Open Vault window, there is one way.
Did this only on Windows 10, so don’t know how to achieve Open Vault window on Mac or other OS (Other Windows versions might have some differences or nuances).
DO THIS ON YOUR OWN RISK.
%appdata%\obsidian
folder. Full path: C:\Users\*username*\AppData\Roaming\obsidian
. For example, with my nickname it would be C:\Users\Ellanxis\AppData\Roaming\obsidian
.obsidian.json
file.Format Document
) and format json into more readable view. By default it’s one big line.ts
– its last opening time (don’t know for sure, of course), used to sort a vaults list in Open Vault window. If you want sort vaults in a certain order, you can manually open vaults one by one in obsidian either you can copy the biggest value and paste to others decreasing by 1 each time. You can see this what I did for my 2-4 vaults at screenshot above."open": true
line in first vault record? This line tells obsidian which vault was opened last time and which will open at next app start."open: true
line AND ALSO !!! DELETE COMMA ON LINE ABOVE !!!. If you edit json in default one-line format it would be look like this:"open":true
and comma before it."open":true
line will appear again.obsidian.json
file (Open context menu on the file → properties). After that tick Read-Only
checkbox → Apply → OK.That’s all. If you don’t mess up something, obsidian should open Open Vault window every time when you run app.
CONS \ NUANCES:
If you will try add\open new vault it would open (in my case), but wouldn’t add to vaults list at Open Vault window. It happens, well, because we ticked Read-only
checkbox and obsidian can write anything to this file. If you need add new vault to list at Open Vault window, you should open properties of obsidian.json
again, uncheck Read-only
checkbox-> Apply->OK, then add new vault(s) and then repeat steps and delete "open":true
line and comma before it.
Instead of pick vault on start-up, on could implement this as a long-click on the obsidian icon. A pop-up could show all available vaults and one could choose before even opening the app: [Feature] App shortcuts/3D touch - #2 by Gnuelp
If there were a commandline option under windows we could have several icons, one for each vault. At least on windows it seems to be quite simple. Unfortunately I was not able to find such a possibility.
You can use several icons to do this.
Opening Obsidian opens that last vault when really I want a different vault. This wastes time as sometimes vaults take a bit of time opening up and then require me to go to the vault picker myself.
Allow a setting that gives the user the choice between:
I noticed that the feature I was looking for (and opening a request for) has been requested multiple times already (e.g. this post and [this post]( Option: Open Last Used Vault or Open Vault Selector - Feature archive - Obsidian Forum)). And they all point to an existing topic: Pick vault on app lauch.
However, that topic seems to have been deleted. If the feature request already exist, I would appreciate a link to it. If not, then I would like to officially request it.
I’m also using Git Bash on my Windows, so I’ve created a workaround script that modifies Obsidian’s obsidian.json
file and changes all "open":true
values to "open":false
before launching Obsidian. That way my Obsidian always launches with the vault selector instead of reopening the last vault. The only downside to this is every time I launch Obsidian, a terminal window shows up for a moment, but it’s just a minor inconvenience to get a very convenient feature.
I’ve figured it might also be helpful to see if I could do it with Windows PowerShell, so people could use this even if they don’t have Git Bash on their systems. Here’s how I’ve set up both versions:
Obsidian.sh
.sed -i 's/\"open\":true/\"open\":false/g' /c/Users/YourWindowsUserName/AppData/Roaming/obsidian/obsidian.json
start obsidian:
Just remember to replace “YourWindowsUserName” with your actual user name.
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Obsidian\Obsidian.exe
as the icon location.Obsidian.ps1
.$filePath = "c:\Users\YourWindowsUserName\AppData\Roaming\obsidian\obsidian.json"
(Get-Content $filePath).Replace("`"open`":true","`"open`":false") | Set-Content $filePath
start obsidian:
Just remember to replace “YourWindowsUserName” with your actual user name.
powershell -noLogo -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -file
So your final target should look something like this:
powershell -noLogo -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -file C:\Obsidian.ps1
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Obsidian\Obsidian.exe
as the icon location.This is a great interim solution, thank you!
After the latest update Obsidian has stopped to open the last used vault and now it asks me to choose a vault on every start. Is it supposed to work like this?
Maybe it’s a good idea to have a toggle between open the last vault and open vault switcher.
Hello everyone, A newbie here… I dont know how to back to the vault I first created. Everytime I open obsidian, it shows .the last opened/ latest vault as a default vault.
Can someone help?
I don’t think this has been mentioned yet, but I’ve noticed that for me at least, Obsidian reopens whichever window was the last to close when it was last quit, and the vault selector counts as one of those windows.
So, for me at least, if the last window to close was a vault, that is the vault that will open when I launch Obsidian again. But if I instead open the vault selector first, close my vault, then close the vault selector, then the vault selector is what will open when I relaunch Obsidian.
What I personally do is keep the vault selector open in the background before I start working. When it comes time to quit, I close my vault window first, revealing the vault selector in the background, which I close second.
I don’t think this workaround has been mentioned yet, so I hope this will work for others too!
continued from above
If anyone is searching for a workaround that minimizes loading times and doesn’t involve complex scripts, I would recommend trying this. For me, this is not a significant disruption to my workflow.
I would also like to suggest that there be a third choice be added to any setting for “default action on launch” for flexibility:
where choosing the third option would then reveal a sub-menu with checkboxes next to all the vaults Obsidian is aware of. When Obsidian is launched, all vaults that are checked would open at once.
While this option may not be used as extensively as the other two, I’m generally in favour of having the extra options if there’s no good reason not to have them, and that seems to be the case here.