Show / hide which file types to be shown in file explorer

Feature requests
22

Use case or problem

I don’t use assets folders. Instead I rename all assets the same name as the file ending with a number, and put them in the same folder. If I need to move a file outside Obsidian I instantly know which other files to grab.

In Windows explorer I have a batch file that auto hides everything except the md files, and with Explorer set to “hide files” (the left column in the screenshot)I get a nice clean look of my md files, but it’s just a click of a mouse to display all hidden files if I must (the right column)

20210111_203614

I would like a similar “hidden items” type checkbox for my Obsidian navigation pane on the left. I need to display the png and jpg etc files when I first save them in my folder so that I can select them and rename them the same as the relevant md file. But once that’s done, they just all get in the way.

20210111_204049
20210111_204049394×593 33.8 KB

Proposed solution

Perhaps this is a plugin issue, in which case I trust the moderators to move my request.

The best solution is to have a simple checkbox at the top of the navigation pane where we currently have the following

image

It would just show/hide hidden items. Of course there would be a setting to determine which extensions we want to show/hide.

Current workaround (optional)

None that I can see.

Just found this similar thread: Show / hide file types to be shown in file explorer

3 Likes
23

Implementing something like this would be great and I think grow to a large software engineer community

Use Case
Markdown files within a code base that have ReadMe.md in subfolders or projects. I have tried this currently with Obsidian with my Home Lab and personal projects folder but it slows Obsidian way down, almost to unusable levels.

If I could put in a .obignore file just like .gitignore in git, then I could keep everything out that is just extra to the codebase.

The only thing currently available is to ignore a whole folder and that becomes way too cumbersome with multiple projects. This reason alone took me away from using the mobile version as it kept freezing up.

Hopefully this can get some traction!!
Thanks for an awesome platform thus far!

4 Likes
24

I was going to suggest exactly that: some way to ignore/hide folders/files using a gitignore-like syntax.

4 Likes
25

I know this is old, but I just spent several hours browsing the forum because I was too dense to find both of these features in settings. I don’t how long they’ve been there, but they work exactly as expected on v. 0.14.6. Wow…what devs–what a product!

1 Like
26

So there is a way to do this now? I cannot find it in the settings… Can you advice where to find it?

Thanks!

1 Like
27

The solution is you make a custom css file to config which kind of file should appear.

div[data-path$='.png']{
	display: none;
}

You can read more in this question

2 Likes
29

I tweaked the above css to establish the following:

  • Paste Screenshots to a Page in a folder.
  • The Screenshot File is stored in the root of the vault with Filename like “Pasted image 20221114171851.png”
  • Mark the Screenshot File in grey as a candidate for manual move.
  • Move this image file manually to the same folder as the page with the embedded folder
  • Hide the Screenshot File in the Folder to keep the File Explorer clean.

This is established by adding this css to your themes css file:

/* Hide Image Files selective */

/* Format Pasted Image in any folder and root */ 
div[data-path*="Pasted image"]{
  display: none;
}

/* Format Pasted Image in the Root */
  div[data-path^="Pasted image"]{
    color: #9999996e;
    display: flex;
  }

I am no css expert, feedback for improving the css is always appreciated.

2 Likes
30

Same here. I tried to hide all word documents and PDFs (backups after migrating from onenote). I just added the following in my main.css file and turned that on in preferences > appearance:

div[data-path$="docx"],
div[data-path$="docx"] + div.nav-folder-children {
  display: none;
}

div[data-path$=".pdf"] {
  display: none;
}

You can change this for any file/folder/file type! Love the fact that Obsidian is so customizable!

3 Likes
31

I found this post because I want to show .txt files in Obsidian. I sometimes have notes with special characters in the contents such as “[”. I don’t want to escape them with \ because I copy/paste the contents. I just don’t want Markdown enabled for the file so that it displays nicely.

I found death-au’s plugin “txt as md” in the Community Plugins, which allows .txt files to show in Obsidian, and doesn’t format them as .md files in the editor.

32

+1! Please, I want to keep some PSD files inside Obsidian (my second brain), I don’t need to Visualize the content of the PSDs in Obsidian, but I would like to see the file and link them, as I need to point those PSDs templates.

33

Here’s another CSS variation: this one hides any file that isn’t markdown. In my vault, it leaves behind a number of empty folders – still trying to figure out how to hide those.

.nav-file-title:not([data-path$='.md']) {
	display: none;
}
34

This should work provided you keep the folder expanded.

.tree-item.nav-folder:not(.is-collapsed):has([data-path$='.md']) {
    display: block;
}
.tree-item.nav-folder:not(.is-collapsed) {
    display: none;

:warning: Once the folder is collapsed the items inside it are removed from the dom so removing the .is-collapsed class from this snippet will hide all your folders.

35

There is still no solution to this, is there? I realize there are css solutions, but there still isn’t an easy way of clicking on something in the navigation pane to say “show all files”/“hide all files except md files”.

I can’t use css because I need my images and pdfs to display so that I can slide them over to my new notes.

Changing the settings all the time is too cumbersome. I need a button I can quickly toggle.

2 Likes
36

This was good enough for me. Might not be exactly what you want but worth a try.

Settings → Files and Links → Detect all file extensions (Toggle this on)

1 Like
37

Thanks for the info.
I tried it, and there are 2 things that prevent this from being a good solution for me.

  1. I can’t create a hotkey to toggle this (it doesn’t appear in the list of things that can be assigned a hotkey)
  2. more important, it requires a full reload of the vault to take effect.

So yes, doable, but not as seamless as I need.

38

Another +1 for this feature.

I’ve been using Obsidian for almost one year now. “Attachment files” (.jpg, .png, .pdf, .pptx and so on) getting in the way of regular pages (.md files) could very well be the no. 1 friction problem I encountered after switching from OneNote.

Mind you: being able to see all file types in the File Explorer can be very useful, but not at all times. In its most simple form, I can hide non-.md files in the File Explorer with a simple toggle.

However, it would be nice to have an “Excel filter”-like panel to quickly enable/disable file types in the File Explorer. Such a filter could be put behind a single button (that should have an indicator when filtering is applied!).

20241205_Mock-up_FileExplorer_filterbutton

I made a little mock-up to illustrate the idea.
20241205_Mock-up_FileExplorer_filterpanel

You can quickly select all or none of the file types. So only showing folders is a possibility by deselecting all checkboxes in a single click. You can also pin file types within the alphabetically arranged list that you frequently use for filtering (I took inspiration from Firefox’s new tab page). Say you often create links to Excel files, but .xlsx is down the list, then you could pin .xlsx to stay on top of the list.

I think this is a QoL improvement that could benefit many (novice and power) users!
Thanks for reading!

2 Likes
39

Obseedee

I love this way of implementing the idea.

The more I use Obsidian the more I need this feature. It is at the point now that it interferes with my workflow.

Too often I have to spend my time expanding the size of the tree on the left to distinguish between filenames in order to find the md vs png.
image

image

2 Likes