🌈 Colorful Folders for Obsidian

Transform your Obsidian file explorer from a dull list into a vibrant, organized, and high-performance visual dashboard.

Colorful Folders automatically applies premium color palettes, smart icons, and structural intelligence to your vault. Whether you prefer a strictly organized, monochromatic workspace or a neon-glowing cyberpunk aesthetic, this plugin makes navigation intuitive and your workspace absolutely beautiful.

Updates for Colorful Folders

🚀 4.2.7 - Collapse Indicators Update

This release introduces control over folder collapse indicators:

🌟 New Features & Fixes

• Individual Folder Border Radius: Set a custom border-radius with a range slider for individual folders/files inside the "Set Custom File Style" context menu modal.

• Toggle Collapse Indicators: Added a new setting toggle Show collapse indicator under the "Appearance and visibility" section in settings to let you hide or show folder collapse arrows in the file explorer.

• Custom Default Open/Closed Folder Icons: You can now define custom global defaults for both closed and open folder icons directly in the settings. Additionally, you can override these icons individually for any folder via the "Set Custom File Style" context menu modal.

• Centered Icon and Text Alignment: Fine-tuned visual alignment to ensure folder/file explorer items, their custom icons, collapse chevrons, and text titles are perfectly centered vertically and look extremely polished.

• Minor Fixes: Fixed styling inconsistencies and optimized background settings.

🌟 4.2.6 - The "Ultimate Performance" Update

🌟 Highlight: The Smart Icon Manager

• Local Icon Packs Support: You can now drop any custom SVG icon pack directly into your .obsidian/icons folder! The plugin automatically detects and loads them using a blazingly fast parallel scanner, meaning even thousands of custom icons won't slow down your startup.
• Completely Optimized Caching: The Icon Manager has been completely rebuilt! The plugin now intelligently caches your custom SVG icons and strictly reloads them only when you change your icon settings. This completely eliminates unnecessary lag when tweaking other options, giving you a lightning-fast customization experience!

⚡ Lightning Fast & Butter Smooth

• Instant Load Times: The plugin now uses a highly optimized grouping engine to calculate styles instantly. No more waiting 10 seconds for colors to appear when you open Obsidian!
• Zero UI Freezing: We've completely rewritten how the plugin processes huge folder trees in the background. It now gracefully pauses to let the app breathe, meaning you can scroll and click without any stuttering.
• Ultra-Snappy Responsiveness: We slashed the refresh delay by 3x! When you change a setting or move a file, the UI updates almost instantaneously.
• Lighter Memory Footprint: We streamlined the core engine to prevent memory bloat, keeping your Obsidian workspace incredibly light and fast.

🎨 New Features, Fixes & Integrations

• Custom Rainbow Texts: You can now enable and customize gorgeous rainbow gradient text on ANY individual file or folder in your vault via the right-click menu!
• Accurate Custom Opacity: Setting a custom folder/file color now locks in the perfect background opacity (50% for folders, 15% for files) instead of improperly fading out based on folder depth. The UI slider now also perfectly reflects these defaults!
• New Tailwind UI Palettes: Added two beautiful new built-in color palettes (Tailwind UI and Tailwind UI Dark) to bring modern, punchy web-design colors directly into your vault.
• Inheritance Problem SOLVED!: Fixed a stubborn bug where subfolders and files were not correctly inheriting colors from their parent folders. Your entire tree will now flawlessly inherit and display the correct colors!
• Flawless Integrations: Re-architected how third-party plugins (like Notebook Navigator) interact with our colors. Everything is now perfectly synchronized, eliminating duplicate styles and boosting overall speed.
• Squeaky Clean Codebase: Cleared out all underlying code warnings and strict errors for a rock-solid, crash-free experience.

✨ Core Features

🎨 Vivid Color & Visual Hierarchy

• Color-Coding Hierarchy: Automatically assigns beautiful, distinct colors to top-level and nested folders.
• Visual Wayfinding: Glowing connector lines create a clear "breadcrumb trail" to your currently active file.
• Smart Rainbow Logic: Cycle files through your palette for a full rainbow effect, or use the Adaptive Heatmap to seamlessly sync with your chosen colors.
• Minimalist Modes: Force subfolders to inherit parent colors, or use Outline Only Mode to remove background tints while keeping bright connecting lines.

🤖 Smart Iconography

• Auto-Icon Engine: Automatically injects high-fidelity icons based on names (e.g., Journal -> 📅, Finance -> 💰).
• 6 Built-in Offline Libraries: Includes Material, FontAwesome, and Vibrant packs for instant, zero-latency styling without internet.
• Enhanced Iconify Support: Import seamlessly with perfect alignment, alias preservation, and custom offsets.
• Universal 18px Sizing: All icons are standardized to a professional 18px baseline with perfect vertical centering.
• Independent Styling: Change icons and emojis without overriding your custom colors.

📁 Advanced Customization & Typography

• Right-Click WYSIWYG Menu: Select "Set Custom File Style" on any item to easily override its color, icon, and text formatting.
• Context-Aware Styling: The style modal pre-fills with currently visible colors and adapts to dark-mode brightness.
• Advanced Typography: Make key projects pop with bold, italic, and custom text color overrides.
• Smart Inheritance: Force a specific style down an entire folder tree with a single click.

📐 Organization & Spacing

• Section Dividers: Group files with vertical visual dividers. Supports Markdown glassmorphic popovers, asymmetrical spacing, and solid/dashed/dotted lines.
• Dynamic Item Counters: Display recursive statistics showing the total folder and file count inside a directory, perfectly color-matched.
• Exclusion Lists: Keep utility directories (like attachments or templates) standard and unaffected by plugin styling.

🎨 Synchronization & Ecosystem

• Tag Color Sync: Automatically color tags that perfectly match a styled folder's name (e.g., styling the folder "Work" styles #Work).
• Custom Tag Rules: Manually map specific tags to any styled folder path (e.g., #todo = /Projects/Active).
• Graph View Sync: Your beautiful folder colors now sync directly into Obsidian's built-in Graph View as color groups for a unified vault aesthetic.

🕵️ Stealth & Privacy Engine

• Visual Privacy: Hide any file or folder from the sidebar instantly via the context menu.
• Ghost Mode: Toggle semi-transparent viewing of hidden items with a sleek blur effect.
• Password Protection: Secure your privacy settings with a custom modal (featuring shake animations for invalid attempts).
• Management Dashboard: Manage all hidden items and recovery options from a dedicated settings card.

🛡️ Stability & Network Privacy

• Cross-Platform Engine: Zero-lag performance on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
• Static Premium Standards: High-performance static visuals replace heavy animations to ensure absolutely zero GPU stutter.
• Vault Maintenance Tools: One-click buttons to reset styling or clear icon libraries, plus an Icon Debug Mode.
• Strict Network Privacy: Makes only one necessary network call to GitHub to fetch the changelog on updates. No user data is ever transmitted.

🛠️ Installation

Via Obsidian Community Plugins (Official & Recommended)

1. Open Obsidian and navigate to Settings > Community plugins.
2. Click Browse next to Community plugins.
3. Search for Colorful Folders.
4. Click Install, then click Enable.

Via BRAT (For Beta Releases)

Want to test the absolute latest features before they hit the store?

1. Install the BRAT plugin from the Obsidian Community gallery.
2. Go to Settings > BRAT > Beta Plugin List.
3. Click Add Beta plugin.
4. Paste the repository URL: https://github.com/RohitNahar-Offical/colorful-folders-obsidian
5. Click Add Plugin.
6. Enable Colorful Folders in your Community plugins tab.

💡 Pro Tip

Access all styling configurations by navigating to Settings > Colorful Folders. Look for the large "💡 Pro Tip" banner at the top of the settings page to discover hidden tricks, including how to set up custom overriding colors!

👨‍💻 Developer Documentation

Looking to understand the internal architecture, contribute features, or debug the styling engine? Check out our comprehensive technical guides:

• Developer Master Guide: The entry point for all technical documentation.
• Internal Engine Architecture: Deep dive into the rendering pipeline and logic flow.
• API Reference: Detailed class and method documentation.
• Customization Guide: Advanced CSS snippets and styling overrides.

**Developed with ❤️ by ROHIT-NAHAR**