Explorer Categories

Give a folder a category. The category carries the color, the marker and the icon — and every folder in it looks the same. Change the category, and all of them follow at once.

That is the whole idea. You are not painting folders one by one; you are sorting them into groups that happen to be visible.

What a category holds

A category is a name plus an appearance, and the appearance is complete:

• a color
• a marker in front of the name — a bar, a dot, or an icon
• an optional background, colored text, bold text
• or the opposite: dim, which makes the whole row step back

Each category carries its own. One can be a quiet gray bar, the next a solid red background, a third just a bold blue name. You are not choosing one style for the whole vault.

Dim is there for the folders you are done with. "Archive", "Finished", "Old clients" — turning them louder is not what you want; turning them quieter is. The whole row fades together, marker and icon included, so a dot in full color cannot pull your eye back to the line that is meant to step aside.

One legend per part of the vault

The same color rarely means the same thing everywhere. Red is "software" in one corner of a vault and "cardiologist" in another. So categories are kept in groups, and a group is simply a legend: a set of categories that belong together. It carries no color and no icon of its own.

Groups are tabs along the top of the management window — you see one legend at a time instead of every category you have ever made. In the context menu each legend becomes its own submenu.

Until you create a second one, none of this is visible. One legend means one list and a flat menu, exactly as if groups did not exist.

Working with it

Assign a category. Right-click a folder, pick a category. Done.

Assign many at once. Alt-click or shift-click several folders in the file explorer, then right-click. The menu title tells you how many folders you picked. Notes in the selection are skipped — a category is always assigned to a folder, never to a single file.

Let subfolders inherit. Turn on "Also applies to subfolders" for a category, and every folder in it passes its color down, including folders you create later. A subfolder with a category of its own keeps it.

Let the files inherit too. "Also applies to the files inside" is a second, separate switch. Turn it on and the files below those folders carry the color as well — and that means every file, not only notes: canvases, PDFs and images sit in the same list and are drawn the same way. It reaches the whole subtree, and a deeper folder with the same switch takes over from there.

It is deliberately not the same switch as the one above. Folding the two together would have turned every folder that already inherits colorful in one go, without anyone changing a setting.

Both switches sit in the management window, on the category — not on the single folder. Everything a category decides is decided in one place.

Manage categories. Right-click any folder and choose "Manage categories …", or run the command from the command palette. The window lists your categories on the left and the settings of the selected one on the right: color, name, marker, icon, the four extra switches and the two inheritance switches. The list on the left is the preview: every row shows its category exactly as the file explorer will, so you see all of them at once rather than only the selected one.

Icons come from Obsidian. Any icon Obsidian ships with, searchable, shown in the color of its category. An icon takes the place of the bar or dot rather than adding to it.

Renaming keeps the category. Move a folder, rename it, rename a folder above it — the assignment follows.

Set the parent apart. A folder that carries the category itself can look different from the folders inheriting below it: bold, a background, colored text, its own icon, its own marker, or the children a shade fainter. Where a choice would have no effect — the category is bold throughout anyway, or a background already decides the text color — the button says so and is struck through instead of quietly doing nothing.

Put the list in the order you want. Two arrows below the list move the selected category one place; two more sort the open group by name, A to Z or back. The same pair of arrows sits next to the group tabs and moves the whole group left or right. Sorting touches the open group only — the other legends keep their places.

Duplicate a category to start a new one from an appearance that already works, instead of setting seven things again.

Move a category to another group when a legend turns out to be the wrong one. The folders keep their color.

Nothing is written until you save

The window works on a draft. Change a color, rename, delete, restore a backup — none of it reaches your vault until you press Save. Cancel puts everything back the way it was, and closing the window counts as cancelling.

Back up your work. "Backup" writes your categories, groups and folder assignments to a readable JSON file: into your downloads folder on the desktop, into explorer-categories-backup/ inside the vault on a phone or tablet, where no downloads folder worth the name exists. "Restore" reads one back — through the system file dialog on the desktop, from a list of what is in that folder on mobile.

A restore replaces everything at once, so it lands in the draft like any other change: Save keeps it, Cancel drops it. The file is checked before you are asked to confirm, so picking the wrong one costs a message, not your colors.

Privacy

The plugin makes no network requests. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no telemetry, no account and no paid tier. Your categories and folder assignments live in data.json inside your vault, and that is the only file the plugin reads or writes on its own.

Two actions leave the vault, and only when you ask for them. Pressing "Backup" on the desktop hands the file to your browser as a download, the way any web page does — it lands in your downloads folder. Pressing "Restore" opens the system file dialog and reads the one file you pick. The plugin has no access to your disk beyond those two dialogs; it uses no Node.js or Electron APIs, which is why it runs on mobile as well.

Interface language

The plugin follows the language set in Obsidian. English and German are built in; every other language gets English.

To add one, copy TEXTS_EN in main.js, translate the entries, and add the list to LANGUAGES. Nothing else changes. Pull requests welcome.

Installing

Explorer Categories is not in Obsidian's community directory yet, so there are two ways in for now.

From a release. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/explorer-categories/, then turn the plugin on under Settings → Community plugins.

With BRAT. BRAT, the Beta Reviewers Auto-update Tool, is a community plugin that installs other plugins straight from GitHub — before they reach the directory — and keeps them up to date afterwards. Install BRAT, then hand it this repository: jdaehler/explorer-categories.

How it works

The plugin never touches the file explorer. It writes a single <style> element into the document head and lets Obsidian do the drawing — no MutationObserver, nothing running in the background, nothing to slow the explorer down. Rules of the same kind are merged, so a vault with several hundred colored folders still produces a short stylesheet.

Requirements

Obsidian 1.12.0 or newer. Works on desktop and mobile.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Author: ARPMAN Built with AI assistance.