Notebook Navigator 1.7 : FINALLY Vertical Split (like File Tree Alternative) 🥳, UI Zoom, Group Files by Subfolder, and 21 other improvements! Now over 100 000 downloads! 🎉
Thanks to all your amazing feedback this has been a busy week! Notebook Navigator 1.7 is a MASSIVE release with many features you have been asking me for a long time.
If you want to support the plugin, please help me spread the word about Notebook Navigator so more people can find it.
For me Notebook Navigator is a real game changer when using Obsidian, but comparing downloads to the total number of Obsidian users there’s still a very small minority using it. Thanks for all your feedback and support!!
Notebook Navigator 1.7 (2025-10-28)
New
- VERTICAL SPLIT! You now have a new setting: Dual pane orientation where you can choose horizontal or vertical split for the dual pane.
- To match this setting you also have a new setting: Background color (mobile & desktop) where you can choose to use separate background colors for both panes (like current), make both panes look like navigation pane, or make both panes look like list pane.
- New UI Zoom for Notebook Navigator! You can now set a custom zoom level for Notebook Navigator independent of Obsidian's zoom level. Separate for desktop and mobile! This is useful if you want to have a larger or smaller font size in Notebook Navigator without affecting the rest of Obsidian. Find it in Settings → Zoom Level!
- You can now also group files by subfolder! The old setting "Group notes by date" is now replaced with a dropdown where you can choose no grouping, date or folder. Note that tags are always sorted by date or none.
- New command: Pin all folder notes. Use it to quickly pin all folder notes in the vault.
- New command: Toggle tag sort order. Use it to quickly switch between alphabetical and frequency based sorting for tags.
- New setting: Date display for name sort. Choose which date to display when sorting notes by name (modified or created).
- New setting: Keep scroll position for shortcuts. Preserves navigation pane position when activating folder or tag shortcuts.
- New setting: Retain tags property after removing last tag. When enabled, the tags property is kept in frontmatter even when the last tag is removed from a note. Default disabled.
- New setting: Reset pane separator position. Use it to reset the separator between navigation and list panes back to default position.
Improved
- Files hidden by property are now shown when "Show hidden items" is toggled with the toolbar button in navigation pane or the command "Toggle hidden items".
- You can now right-click shown hidden folders and choose "Unhide" without going to settings.
- "Folder Note Properties" can now be entered as a text area for full control of what is copied to frontmatter.
- New option for "Default folder note type": "Ask". Will now ask you if you want to create a Markdown, Canvas or Base when creating a new folder note from the context menu. Thanks @artuncolak for the PR!
- If your homepage is open in another tab during startup, it will now be focused instead of opening it again in the current tab.
- You can now scroll the file tags in list pane if there are many tags.
Changed
- The toolbar settings for "Show hidden items", "Search" and "Show notes from subfolders" are no longer synced across devices. All toolbar buttons were reset as an effect of this, so you have to click the pin shortcuts toolbar button after upgrading.
Fixed
- Fixed a startup crash issue when parsing tags with double slash in their path, like #tag//subtag. Thanks @kennethn for helping me fix this one.
- Fixed a crash when resizing left pane while using banner image. The scrollbar that appears triggered an infinite render loop. Thanks @muttleydosomething for all the amazing help solving this one.
- Fixed an issue where root folder added to shortcuts would show without name and with the wrong icon.
- Fixed an issue where the style setting "Selected file parent folder color" did not work.
- Fixed an issue where the style settings "Selection background for folders and tags" applied to list pane.
- Fixed two drag and drop issues: Dragging a file from a subfolder to the list pane would cause it to move to the current folder, and dragging and holding in listpane would incorrectly cause the current folder to expand in navigation pane.
- Files and tags in shortcuts area now properly show background color.
- Fixed a bug where IME preedit text was not replaced on commit, causing duplicated Latin input when typing with a Chinese IME active.
- Excalidraw files now display with clean names (without .excalidraw suffix) and maintain correct list item height when renamed.