Folder Reader

Read all notes in a folder together — one continuous, scrolling view.

Right-click any folder and choose Read notes together: every Markdown note directly inside that folder is rendered one after another in a single tab, in name order, like one long document. Perfect for journals, chat archives, meeting notes, book chapters, or any folder you want to read rather than click through file by file.

Features

• Folder context menu — right-click a folder → Read notes together.
• Command palette — Read current note's folder together opens the view for the active note's parent folder.
• One continuous page — notes are rendered sequentially with their titles as section headers, sorted by file name (numeric-aware, so 2024-01-02 < 2024-01-10 < 2024-02-01 reads chronologically).
• Fast on huge folders — notes render lazily in batches of 15 as you scroll (via IntersectionObserver), so a folder with hundreds of notes opens instantly.
• Fully interactive — each note title is clickable and opens the original file (Ctrl/Cmd-click for a new tab). Wikilinks, embeds, images, and tags inside rendered notes work normally.
• Refresh button in the tab header re-reads the folder.
• Zero overhead — no network calls, no settings, no data files. Plain JavaScript, no build step, works on desktop and mobile.

Usage

1. Right-click a folder in the file explorer.
2. Choose Read notes together.
3. Scroll. That's it.

Notes:

• Only .md files directly inside the folder are included. Subfolders are not recursed — open them separately.
• Frontmatter is hidden from the rendered output.
• The view restores itself across app restarts (the folder path is saved in the workspace layout).

Installation

Community plugins (recommended)

Search for Folder Reader in Settings → Community plugins → Browse and install it. (Pending directory approval.)

BRAT

Add jagajaga/obsidian-folder-reader in BRAT.

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them to <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/folder-reader/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Folder Reader in Settings → Community plugins.

How it works

The plugin registers a custom view type. When you open it for a folder, it lists the folder's direct Markdown children, sorts them by name, and renders each with Obsidian's built-in MarkdownRenderer — the same engine used by reading view, so themes and CSS snippets apply automatically. Rendering is chunked behind an IntersectionObserver sentinel so only what you scroll to is processed.

There are no network requests, no telemetry, and nothing is written anywhere.

Development

The plugin is intentionally dependency-free: main.js is plain JavaScript loaded directly by Obsidian — there is no bundler and no build step.

git clone https://github.com/jagajaga/obsidian-folder-reader
cd obsidian-folder-reader
# edit main.js / styles.css
cp main.js manifest.json styles.css <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/folder-reader/
# reload Obsidian

Releases are automated: pushing a tag that matches the version in manifest.json (e.g. 1.0.1, no v prefix) builds a GitHub release with main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css attached.

Related

If you also want to publish folders of notes to the web with private, unguessable URLs, see Private Quartz Publish.

License

MIT © Arseniy Seroka