Hierarchical TOC

A plugin for displaying child notes of the currently active note in a hierarchical tree view.

About

This plugin is a fork of obsidian-virt-folder by gr0grig. I am very thankful to the original author for creating such a useful foundation.

Key Difference: While the original Virtual Folder plugin provides an overview of your entire vault's hierarchical structure, this plugin is modified to serve as a Table of Contents (TOC) for the currently active note. It displays only the child notes of the active note, not the entire vault hierarchy.

Installation

Using BRAT (Recommended for Beta Testing)

The easiest way to install this plugin is using the BRAT (Beta Reviewers Auto-update Thingy) plugin:

1. Install BRAT from the Obsidian Community Plugins
2. Open the command palette and run the command BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing
3. Enter this repository URL: https://github.com/andresgongora/obsidian-hierarchical-toc
4. Enable the plugin in Settings → Community Plugins

BRAT will automatically keep the plugin updated with the latest changes from the repository.

Manual Installation

1. Download the latest release from the GitHub releases page
2. Extract the files to your vault's plugins folder: <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/hierarchical-toc/
3. Reload Obsidian
4. Enable the plugin in Settings → Community Plugins

How It Works

The plugin shows a tree view in the sidebar that displays notes linked by parent-child relationships:

• Notes should have a YAML frontmatter field parent with the name of the parent note
• When you open a note, the tree view automatically refreshes to show its children
• You can expand nodes to see their children one level at a time
• The tree view starts collapsed on each refresh

Example

Complete Vault Hierarchy

Here's a comprehensive example showing the complete hierarchical structure of a vault. Note that each note may have more than one parent (notice for eaxmple F), creating a flexible knowledge graph rather than a strict tree. Also note that this relationship is note defined by folder structure but rather by the parent field in each note's frontmatter.

A
├── B
│   ├── E
│   │   ├── I
│   │   │   └── M
│   │   └── J
│   │       └── M
│   └── F
│       └── K
├── C
│   ├── F
│   │   └── K
│   ├── G
│   │   └── K
│   │       └── N
│   └── H
└── D
    ├── G
    │   └── K
    │       └── N
    └── H
        └── L
            └── N

Active Note View

When you open a specific note in Hierarchical TOC, only its children are displayed. For example, if note C is the active note, the tree view would show:

C (active)
├── F
│   └── K
├── G
│   └── K
│       └── N
└── H

This focused view helps you navigate the immediate descendants of your current note, making it easier to explore your knowledge base one level at a time without being overwhelmed by the entire vault structure.

Further Reading

For a comprehensive understanding of hierarchical note structures and the original plugin's capabilities, please refer to:

• Original Virtual Folder plugin
• Virtual Folder documentation on GitBook