Configuration

Everything is configured in Settings → Hidden Folders Access.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
Hidden folders	List of toggles	All off	One toggle per hidden folder found at the vault root. Enabling a toggle kicks off indexing in the background with a progress notification; disabling it runs a background cleanup. Both are non-blocking.
Refresh folder list	Button	—	Re-scan the vault root to pick up hidden folders added after startup. This only refreshes the list — it does not re-index folders that are already enabled.
Allowed extensions	Text (CSV)	All Obsidian-native formats	Comma-separated list of file extensions (no leading dot) that should be indexed. Folders are always traversed — the filter only affects which files get injected. Edits become effective only when you click Save; that triggers a background rebuild of every enabled folder.
Save	Button	—	Apply the edited allowlist. Disabled while the textarea matches the persisted value (whitespace, casing, duplicates and leading dots are ignored in that comparison).
Reset to defaults	Button	—	Restore the allowlist to every file type Obsidian supports natively (Markdown, Canvas, Bases, images, PDF, audio, video). Applies immediately — no Save required.

Only folders at the vault root are shown. Nested dot-folders (e.g. SomeFolder/.archive/) are not listed individually — they are automatically included if their root ancestor is enabled and already visible to Obsidian.

The Obsidian configuration directory (usually .obsidian/) is never listed and cannot be enabled.

Persistence

Settings are saved per-vault in:

<Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/hidden-folders-access/data.json

Schema:

{
    "enabledFolders": [".claude", ".github"],
    "allowedExtensions": ["md", "canvas", "base", "png", "pdf"]
}

allowedExtensions is always stored lowercase, without leading dots. Missing or empty entries fall back to the defaults (every format Obsidian supports natively).

You can back up or version-control this file alongside your vault config.

Missing folders

An entry in enabledFolders that no longer matches a folder on disk is kept as-is in the config. The plugin silently skips indexing for that entry — no error notification, no warning, no rebuild — and picks it up again automatically the next time the folder appears (Obsidian restart, plugin toggle, Rescan hidden folders command, or toggling the folder in the settings tab once it reappears). This keeps external workflows that delete and recreate dot-folders (e.g. re-cloning .claude/) from corrupting your configuration.

Compatibility

• Desktop only (the plugin manifest sets isDesktopOnly: true). Mobile Obsidian does not expose the filesystem primitives this plugin relies on.
• Tested with Obsidian 1.4+ on Linux, macOS, and Windows.