Explorer Order Editor

Put the folders and notes inside a folder in the order you want, by dragging them in the file explorer itself. No renaming, no number prefixes, and the order is kept in your vault rather than in .obsidian/ — so sync setups that exclude that folder (Dropbox, for example) keep it.

Works on its own, with nothing else to install. The order lives in one plain-text note inside your vault: it syncs with your notes, diffs in version control, and can be read or edited by hand.

Four ways to reorder

All four write to the same place, so you can mix them freely.

Drag a row in the file explorer. Drop it on the top or bottom edge of another row — a line shows where it will land. Dropping on the middle of a folder row still moves the item into that folder, exactly as it always has. An edge drop inside a different folder does both at once: the item moves there and lands in that spot rather than at the end. Holding a drag near the top or bottom of the list scrolls it, faster the closer to the edge you get.

Arrange a whole folder in a dialog. Right-click a folder and choose Explorer order → Set order, drag its children into place, then Save. Clear order appears beside it only when that folder has an order to remove. For the vault root, right-click the empty space below the last row, or use the Set explorer order for vault root command.

Nudge one item from the right-click menu. Move up, Move down, Move to top and Move to bottom work on any file or folder, and only the ones that would actually do something are offered. They are off by default, since dragging a row already does the same job and four extra entries is a lot to add to a menu you open constantly. Show move actions in the file explorer menu turns them on.

Nudge one item with a hotkey. The same four are commands, bindable whether or not the menu shows them. Which item a hotkey moves follows the keyboard: the row the file explorer has focused while you are in the tree, and the note you have open otherwise. That is also what lets a hotkey move a folder, since the note you have open never is one.

Inside the dialog

It works on mobile as well as desktop — drag a row by its grip handle, using a long press on touch. Dragging is not the only way to move a row: each one has buttons that send it straight to the top or bottom, and on desktop Alt+↑/Alt+↓ nudge the focused row a step at a time while Alt+Shift+↑/Alt+Shift+↓ send it to either end.

You don't have to build an order from scratch. Sort by, at the end of the path line, arranges the rows by name, creation date or modification date in either direction; sort by a date and each row shows the date it was sorted on. Folders always come first, because Obsidian records no dates for them at all. Sorting rearranges the dialog and nothing else — Save keeps the result, Cancel leaves the folder as it was. What you save is that arrangement, not a rule that keeps re-applying: a file added later joins the end.

Because an order covers one folder at a time, the dialog also lets you walk the tree without closing it: every folder row has an arrow button that opens that folder, and each level of the path at the top is clickable. Nothing is saved behind your back — if you have dragged rows, the button you are about to click reads Save and open "…" and does exactly that; if you have touched nothing, opening a folder writes nothing at all.

What an order covers

One folder only; an order does not cascade. Ordering Projects rearranges the items directly inside it, while Projects/Client A keeps sorting as it did until you give that folder its own order.

Moving an item in a folder you have never ordered simply records the order you can already see, with that one item moved — you never have to arrange a whole folder before you can nudge one thing in it. Names the order doesn't mention keep whatever position Obsidian's own sort setting gives them, so an ordered folder still respects your choice of name, modified time or anything else for everything you didn't place by hand.

Renaming an item keeps its position, and deleting it — or moving it out of the folder — drops it from the order. Moving an item into a folder keeps the spot you dropped it on if you dropped it on an edge; any other kind of move has nothing to say about where you wanted it, so it joins the end.

Where the order is stored

One note for the whole vault — explorer-order.md at the root by default — in a fenced json block, one folder per line:

{
  "Projects/Alpha": ["Design.md", "Notes", "TODO.md"],
  "Projects/Beta": ["b.md", "a.md"]
}

Names are exactly as they appear in the vault, extensions included, and any name can be stored whatever characters it contains. Anything unlisted sorts to the end, so you only pin what you care about. One line per folder is deliberate: a three-way merge in git then resolves conflicts per folder rather than on the whole file. Only the contents of that one block are ever rewritten — any prose you add around it, and any other block, is left byte-for-byte alone. If the block cannot be parsed, the plugin says so and refuses to write until you fix it, rather than overwriting a file it could not read.

Settings

• Automatically refresh after saving (on) — redraw the file explorer as soon as an order changes. With it off, the change is still written immediately and shows up at the explorer's next refresh.
• Hide the order note in the file explorer (on) — keep explorer-order.md out of the tree, since it is a byproduct of using the plugin rather than something you wrote. Search, the quick switcher and the graph still show it.
• Drag to reorder in the file explorer (on) — turn it off to leave the tree's drag-and-drop exactly as Obsidian ships it.
• Show move actions in the file explorer menu (off) — the four move entries above. The commands stay bindable to hotkeys either way.

Four more rows appear only when there is something for them to do: Repair the order note, Delete the kept copies of unreadable order notes, Remove orders for missing folders, and Clear every saved order — which confirms first, naming how many folders are affected, and never touches your files.

If the order note can't be read

A bad hand edit or a sync conflict can leave the note unparseable. The plugin says so and stops writing, but it does not touch the file: a note being edited by hand passes through invalid JSON on every autosave, and healing at that moment would overwrite what you were typing.

It repairs the next time you actually ask for something — saving an order, or the Repair the order note row. The unreadable text is copied to a note beside it first, so nothing is destroyed to make room, and what gets rebuilt is the union of three sources: whatever can still be read from the broken note line by line, whatever the plugin has in memory, and a backup it keeps in its own plugin data. One folder per line means a single mangled line costs one folder rather than the file, and git conflict markers leave both sides' folders intact. If none of the three yields anything, the note is left exactly as it is — a repair never replaces your only copy with an empty one.

Two other messages mean something else. If an order could not be written — a full disk, a locked file — the plugin says so and keeps showing the new order, so fix the cause and reorder something soon after: that writes everything the session is still holding. If it says it could not read its own data.json, your saved orders are safe in the note, but settings show their defaults and changes to them will not stick until it can be read: repair or delete that file and the plugin picks it up by itself, or press Read it again in its settings.

Known limitations

• An order is keyed by folder path, so a folder renamed or moved while this plugin isn't running — on another device, or with the plugin disabled — leaves its order under a path nothing lives at any more. Renames made while it is running are followed automatically. Orders for folders that no longer exist are kept rather than pruned, since a missing folder is just as likely to be sync lag as a real deletion; Remove orders for missing folders clears them when you are sure.
• Every order lives in one file, so two devices reordering different folders at the same time can produce a sync conflict on it, where a per-folder layout would not. Obsidian Sync leaves a conflict copy; a git merge resolves per folder.
• The saved order is rendered by wrapping a method inside Obsidian's file explorer, which is not part of its public API, so an Obsidian update could in principle stop it working. The wrapper is written to fail quietly — on anything unexpected it hands back the explorer's own ordering untouched — so the worst case is that a saved order stops being applied, never a broken file tree.
• There is no multi-select drag; reordering is one row at a time.

Installation

In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for Explorer Order Editor, then install and enable it. There is nothing to configure before it works.

From 0.5.0 onward this plugin needs Obsidian 1.13 or newer. On an older Obsidian you are offered 0.4.2 instead, which is complete and fully working; you simply stop receiving updates until you update the app. To track pre-release builds, point BRAT at https://github.com/vcarus/obsidian-explorer-order-editor.

Contributing

Development setup, the source layout and the release process are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.