Use case or problem
This topic has come up a lot but it seems it’s never been solved.
As a Neuro Divergent I find extremely painful to mix some of my separate areas of life, for example technology and programming with other creative pursuits.
When taking notes on these two different contexts the content (according to my brain) should be organized in two different ways, one in a more free-style organization, using links to encourage creativity and discovery and the other should be much more rigid and hierarchical.
I’ve been trying for so long to make these two contexts live together in the same vault but it’s just impossible for me. When I say impossible, I mean that I get extremely distracted when I’m trying to take notes on a technical thing and all around I can see all my other contexts popping up, maybe while creating a link or just simply visible inbox notes that DISTRACTS me very much and push me to detour and never finish what I was doing.
The simple solution would be to have two separate vaults.
BUT some of the topics of these two different worlds are connected and I need to link them and navigate them from time to time.
Again, I could make cross-vaults links, but it’s another pain point and distraction for me.
To recap, if I had two vaults, these are the problems:
- It’s difficult to link some of the notes (not impossible, but very difficult for me)
- It’s difficult to keep track which note is in which vault
- It’s difficult to decide where my daily notes should live, some might be related to context A and some to context B. Keeping them in a central place would be ideal
- It’s difficult to maintain two separate plugin ecosystems, settings, colors, templates, and so on…
Proposed solution
If you have ever used Calibre, it has a feature called Virtual Library where you first apply a filter to your library, then you save it and it creates a virtual subset of your books, hiding those that don’t match the filter criteria.
This is very different to have two libraries because this way you still keep all your metadata, tags, hierarchies, saved searches and so on. That is very convenient and help folks extremely distractible like myself.
Now, something like that in Obsidian would be life-saver for ND people (I’d like any ND folks to jump in the comment and write what you think).
To summarize, this function or plugin should:
- show / hide part of your library that match some criteria (folder, tags, whatever)
- you might still link notes that are not visible but it should be obvious that they don’t belong to your current active context (by color for example)
Current workaround (optional)
- Multiple vaults or sub-vaults but no ideal
- Make.md plugin using Spaces but this doesn’t hide part of your library, everything is still there (just arranged differently)
- GitHub - ozntel/file-tree-alternative: This Obsidian Plugin allows users to have a different file explorer experience. offers some solution, still not ideal