Vault Shelf

Your Obsidian vault as a browsable library.

Project maintained by luke321 Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Features

Browse, collect, arrange and read the same notes in different ways. These clips use the generated vault, recorded at 1000 × 1000. The live demo lets you try the library yourself.

Overview · Collect and arrange · Shape the library · Find and read · Keep your place

Overview

A library of your notes

Browse the same vault as shelves of books. A note can belong in several books while staying in its original file.

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The reading room

A centred bookcase keeps shelves within reach. Long shelves continue onto the next board, and the page makes room as the window narrows.

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Six shelves to start

Favourites starts empty. Encyclopedia, Years, Months, People and Tags each organise the whole vault differently. Build a Weeks shelf whenever you want an ISO-week view.

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A closer look at a spine

A thicker spine holds more notes. Hover to read its title, note count, entries and visits, source folders and a few of the notes inside.

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Back in the library

The walkthrough closes on the library: a room made from the notes you already have. This is the closing overview, with the books ready to open again.

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Collect and arrange

Collect your favourites

Drag a book onto Favourites, then arrange it among the books already there. A favourite follows its source book as notes change; dragging it off removes only the reference. Create more collection shelves in the builder.

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Make a book

Right-click a gap on a shelf arranged by hand to make a book. Give it a name and a source: a folder, a tag, a person or the whole vault. Preview its notes and choose its colour, binding and contents order before saving.

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Edit a book

Right-click a book you made to change its name or what it holds. Renaming preserves its reading places. Deleting the book removes its saved rule and leaves every note in the vault.

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A place for another book

The quiet plus after the last book opens the same creation sheet and adds the new book at the end. It appears on shelves arranged by hand, including Favourites.

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Arrange books by hand

Choose Arranged by hand for a shelf, then drag books between neighbours or across rows. Alt+Left and Alt+Right move a focused book one place. Arranging changes where books stand and keeps their contents and saved places.

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Reach the next shelf

Carry a book or shelf toward the top or bottom of the library and the room scrolls with your drag. Move away from the edge to stop; Escape cancels the move.

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Shape the library

Build a shelf

Choose which notes belong, then what makes a book: title, year, month, ISO week, person, tag, folder or any note property. A preview shows the actual books and counts. Recipes give you a starting point you can change.

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Manage your shelves

The gear opens Manage. Press a shelf’s name to jump to it; reorder, edit, hide or delete shelves there. Hiding keeps the books, and deleting a shelf never deletes notes. Shelf gear and eye controls also sit beside each shelf’s counts.

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Colours and leather bindings

Choose from fourteen colours and six bindings: Original, Minimal, Gilt, Morocco, Vellum and Aged. Hover or focus a choice to preview it, then select to keep it. A book, a plaque’s whole run or a shelf can receive the change. Manage also lets you edit book and ribbon colours and coordinate books by year or decade.

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Open a whole run

Months and weeks gather under years, years under decades, and people and tags under letters. Click a plaque to read its run as one book. When a run wraps, either copy of its plaque opens the same collection.

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Find and read

The shelf parts as you type

Search titles, book covers, tags, people and folders. Matching books come forward while the rest stay as faint spines in their places. Clear the query to bring the room back. Note bodies and file paths are outside this search.

Open a matching book and the left contents scroll to the first match, keeping your selected note on the right. Marked rows show every match. The note highlights the matching title or metadata; a match from a cover names that book. The library query keeps the full contents visible. Find within this book narrows them using the same search rule.

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Words from your vault

As you type, suggestions offer people, tags, folders, the names printed on book covers and note titles. Use the arrow keys and Enter, or click a suggestion, to complete the search. The offered words and the library’s matches use the same catalogue of names.

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Read a two-page spread

Find the contents and a search within the book on the left, and your note on the right. With a library search active, opening the book brings its first matching contents row into view without changing the note on the right. Matching rows and highlighted metadata explain the results. The book’s own search narrows its contents by the same rule. In Obsidian, its renderer draws links, embeds, callouts, tasks, tables and code. Wide tables scroll inside the page.

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Turn the page

Use Previous and Next in the footer, or the arrow keys. With the wheel, push past the end of a note to turn forward; push back at its start to return. The gesture has resistance and works on short notes too. A continued flick turns once until you pause.

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Jump through the index

Edge tabs follow the book’s contents: letters for A–Z, periods for Date. Long indexes compress to fit; narrow windows place the tabs below the pages. The magnifying-glass tab and Ctrl/Cmd+F bring you to search within the book.

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Choose A–Z, Date or Number

Set a contents default for a shelf, a plaque’s run or one book. The reader’s switch changes both contents and tabs while keeping the selected note and its scroll position. Fresh Encyclopedia and Tags books start in A–Z; other books start with dates, oldest first. A book whose notes all start with a digit is offered Number in place of A–Z, and starts there: 3 and 7 read before 12, 24 and 1000 rather than after 2026.

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See another collection

Also shelved in opens another book on the same note. Links stay within the library when it contains their destination. Previous collection and Alt+Left return to the collection you came from.

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Keep your place

Keep a ribbon in it

Save a note and ribbons hang from the books that contain it. The Reading shelf gathers your marked books. Reading places survive rearranging or rebuilding, and resolve through another visible shelf if the original is hidden. Each reader ribbon carries its book’s binding.

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Books carry their age and use

Books show their age, entries and visits. Existing notes count once per book; a newly added note or a visit adds to its activity. Reopening the vault or removing and restoring the same note does not count that entry again. Age also adds wear after one, three and seven years, measured from the newest dated note. Each book remembers its last actual visit; until then, its last-opened value is never. Your bindings and earlier visit counts stay intact.

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What stays true

Shelves count unique notes, even when several books contain the same one.
Missing dates and properties get Undated or Unfiled books. Dates use chosen properties, then the title, then an optional file timestamp; people come from declared properties or links to declared person notes.
Hiding keeps a shelf’s definition and books. Deleting a shelf or made book never deletes notes.
The plugin follows changes in your vault, writes nothing to notes and makes no network requests.
Keyboard controls, named buttons, visible focus, reduced motion and a plain list mode keep the library usable in more than one way.
Leather is the offered look. Modern and Cyber remain shelved.

The README covers installation, settings and the standalone exporter. The design records explain the choices behind the library.