Tips

This page contains useful tips and tricks shared by the community.

Recommended CSS Snippets

Hide HTML Comments on Non-Active Lines

Since this plugin uses HTML comments for query definitions and serialized output markers, your notes may appear cluttered with comment tags. You can use a CSS snippet to hide these comments on non-active lines, showing only a collapsed indicator (<!-- …) until you click on that line.

Create a file named hide-non-active-comments.css in your vault’s .obsidian/snippets/ folder with the following content:

/* Hide HTML comments in non-active lines (displays as `<!-- …`) */
.cm-line:not(.cm-active) .cm-comment:not(.cm-hmd-codeblock) {
  display: block;
  max-width: 5ch;
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow: hidden;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
  font-style: italic;
}

Then enable the snippet in Settings → Appearance → CSS snippets.

Without the snippet: All HTML comments are fully visible, which can be visually noisy.

With the snippet: Comments on non-active lines collapse to <!-- …, and expand when you place your cursor on that line.

This provides a cleaner editing experience while still allowing you to see and edit the full comment content when needed.

Thanks to @vergenzt for sharing this snippet in issue #37.

Performance Optimization

Ignore Past and Archived Folders

If you have a large vault with years of content, you can improve performance by adding folders containing older or archived notes to the Folders to ignore setting. This prevents the plugin from scanning files that rarely need updates.

Common folders to consider ignoring:

Past journal entries: Journal/2022, Journal/2023, Daily Notes/2024
Old meeting notes: Meetings/Archive, Meetings/2023
Archived projects: Projects/Archived, Projects/Completed
Reference material: Reference, Templates

To configure this, go to Settings → Dataview Serializer → Folders to ignore and add the paths to folders you want to exclude.

Note: Files in ignored folders will still work normally in Obsidian—they simply won’t have their serialized queries automatically updated. If you later need to update a query in an ignored folder, you can temporarily remove it from the ignore list or move the file to an active folder.