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Use case or problem
Obsidian has two hierarchy of configuration, the global configuration in the user’s home directory ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/obsidian/obsidian.json
on Linux).
Some users want to enforce common behavior between all of their computers using Obsidian. Many developers use Git to version control their config files between computers. This can already be done now, sort of.
Certain package managers want to enforce strict version requirements (Nix and Guix) because these package managers have very strict notions of what version of a program and its libraries are running. This means that letting Obsidian auto-update goes against these package managers’ design features.
Both of these issues stem from the fact that Obsidian’s global configuration has both user-requested configuration and Obsidian auto-generated configuration in the same file. Namely, the location of every vault, and some of its state is stored in obsidian.json
too.
Proposed solution
Split the global configuration ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/obsidian/obsidian.json
on Linux) into two separate configuration files. One that the user can fully control (to disable automatic updates for instance) and one that is auto-generated by Obsidian (to locate vaults for instance).
Current workaround (optional)
For Nix/Guix, the only workaround is to overwrite obsidian.json
with user-specified configuration every time Obsidian is run. However, this is not a real solution, barely even a workaround.
Related feature requests (optional)
This request is quite similar to Split config file into 2 parts - one more permantent, one ephemeral.