[Plugin] I wanted the file explorer to show only the notes I'm working on, so I made it do that

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Disclaimer

Is this plugin open source? Yes
Is this plugin completely free? Yes
Is this plugin vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory: community.obsidian.md/plugins/spaces

TL;DR

• Switchable views for your vault that provide content-curated mini-workspaces
• Reorder your notes and folders with responsive drag and drop
• Looks and feels native to enhance your workflow, not get in its way
• Lightweight, fast and responsive, shipping no runtime dependencies or network calls

Note: a new release hasn’t yet been tested by the auto-scanner, but should address all existing cautionary issues and I expect the review health to be in the green this week.

What I love about Obsidian is that it’s honest and upfront about its mission; the software is ephemeral, the data is not. The only thing I really missed and needed for my own organizational needs is a way to split up a single vault into smaller areas of contextually relevant content. The suggestion to simply have multiple vaults always felt way too clunky and required too many clicks to switch contexts easily.

To solve this, I created the Spaces plugin. Largely inspired by the Arc Browser’s tab spaces UI/UX, Spaces allows you to create spaces in which you can either select notes and folders to display in it or pin a space to a folder directly to essentially make that folder a space itself.

Ephemerality was key, so this plugin does not augment your vault files; you can add notes and folders like you normally would in any space, and this simply creates the notes either in your vault root or in your folder that is pinned to a space. Spaces simply provides lenses over your data.

I also decided early on to delegate to Obsidian what it already does quite well. Spaces doesn’t ship its own kludgy file explorer, it simply rides on Obsidian’s. Your themes still apply, snippets should still apply, and the right-click context menu is largely the same, with a few additions.

This also means that there is nothing to actually migrate if you’re switching from another Obsidian solution that trying to solve something similar. Spaces simply provides fancy filtering with its own data.json. The plugin doesn’t create any folders, sidecar files nor any metadata in your notes. If you disable it, your vault is exactly as it was.

It ships no runtime dependencies, and makes no network requests. If you don’t like the plugin, uninstalling is a zero-cost operation on your vault!

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AI Disclosure:

This post was not written by AI!

The software was built using AI-assistance with Claude Code. I’m a senior embedded software engineer and experienced software architect of 12+ years and work with Javascript and react in my day job. If you look at the code and see something wonky, please let me know because I’m still learning!

1 Like
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This plugin is great and is exactly what I wanted! Thank you!

The one advice that I can give is, in order to make the plugin feel more native, avoid forcing custom styles and use native theme selectors instead? For example the buttons on the bottom have a big box-shadow that is not present in the rest of Obsidian icon buttons, so they stand out too much . Also it would be nice if the icons without assigned color used default Obsidian icon color, so they do not clash with the theme.

It is not really a big deal, I managed to fix it for myself with some css, but maybe something to consider

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Hey there, thanks for giving it a shot! I’m happy you’re enjoying it! This is great feedback.

Admittedly, I’ve used Obsidian in a pretty vanilla way over the last several years and haven’t explored themes/styling. I absolutely want to make sure that this plugin doesn’t get in the way of peoples desired look while still providing the core functionality this plugin promises.

I’ll put it on my roadmap to take a more serious look into themes/styling and providing options to reduce collisions with peoples’ existing vault themes, and/or at the very least provide some more flexible settings to make it easier to do so.

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Also, regarding the note on not assigning colors: this is actually currently supported!

If you go into the settings you will see the following setting which you can toggle off. This will by default make your icons neutral color!

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I have this option enabled, but it makes icons gray, instead of using colors assigned by the theme.

If you look at the original Obsidian UI icons, you can see they use css variables like “–icon-color” instead of applying colors directly. These variables can be changed by the theme, allowing theme devs to change all colors of sertain elements at once.

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Ah, yes now I see. Thank you! I’ll work on adding this into the next release (likely out at the end of the weekend). Really appreciate the feedback!

1 Like
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Latest 0.6.0 release now fixes a lot of these things and obey users’ theme options for icons and colors.

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Spaces 0.8.0 is Released

What’s New

A space can hold a tag. Every note carrying it appears in the space, wherever it lives in your vault. Nested tags match, so project includes project/atlas. Add the tag to a note and it appears, remove it and it leaves.

Members mix freely. One space can hold a folder, a tag and a few hand-picked notes at once. You can also drop a single note without dropping what brings it in, and put it back later.

One picker window. Vault shows your notes and folders, Tags shows your tags as a tree, and typing # jumps straight to Tags. A row underneath counts what the space comes to as you build it.

Spaces only reads the tags you already have. It never writes one or touches your frontmatter.

:star: Star the repo here: obsidian-spaces
:rock: Get the plugin here: obsidian-spaces

What Spaces Is

What I love about Obsidian is that it’s honest and upfront about its mission; the software is ephemeral, the data is not. The only thing I really missed was a way to split up a single vault into smaller areas of contextually relevant content. The suggestion to simply have multiple vaults always felt way too clunky and required too many clicks to switch contexts easily.

Largely inspired by the Arc Browser’s tab spaces UI/UX, Spaces lets you pick the notes and folders to display in a space, or pin a space to a folder to essentially make that folder a space itself.

There is nothing to migrate. Spaces simply provides fancy filtering with its own data.json. It creates no folders, no sidecar files and no metadata in your notes. If you disable it, your vault is exactly as it was.

It ships no runtime dependencies, and makes no network requests. If you don’t like the plugin, uninstalling is a zero-cost operation on your vault!