Jemz Vault Assistant

Capture, vault health, and smart retrieval in one unified dashboard for Obsidian.

Three problems every growing vault runs into, solved in one place:

• Capture & inbox triage — get a thought into the vault in seconds, then work the inbox down to zero with a keyboard-driven triage mode.
• Vault health — find broken links, orphan notes, empty notes, unused attachments, duplicate titles, misspelled tags and missing properties, then fix them safely.
• Smart retrieval — find notes without remembering where they are, using saved views and visual filters. No query language.

Everything runs locally. There are no network calls, and the optional analytics are off by default and never see your content.

Install

From Community Plugins

Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for Jemz Vault Assistant → Install → Enable.

Manually

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them into <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/jemz-vault-assistant/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Requires Obsidian 1.7.2 or newer. Works on desktop and mobile.

Getting started

On first run a short welcome tour offers to create the two folders the plugin uses — 00-Inbox for captures and 04-Archive for archived notes. Nothing is created without your say-so, and you can change both folders in settings.

Open the dashboard from the compass icon in the ribbon, or run Jemz Vault Assistant: Open dashboard.

The three tabs

Inbox

Lists everything waiting: notes with status: inbox, plus anything sitting in your inbox folder that has not been given a status yet. Each item shows its type, creation date, source domain and a short preview, with eight actions: open, process, convert to task, move, tag, link, archive, delete.

Triage mode takes over the screen and walks you through one item at a time:

At the end you get a summary of what you did and how much is left.

Health

A 0–100 score, a card per issue category, and the list of what was found. Eight checks:

Notes with unparseable frontmatter are reported separately, because the fix is repairing the YAML rather than adding properties.

Nothing is ever changed without your review. Every fix follows the same path: you select issues, a preview modal lists the exact files and edits, a timestamped backup is written, and only then are changes applied. If a file changed between the preview and the apply, it is skipped rather than overwritten. Deletion moves files to the trash; permanent deletion needs a second, separately worded confirmation. Jemz Vault Assistant: Restore last fix backup undoes the most recent batch.

Find

Saved views on the left, search and filters on the right.

Built in: Recent notes · Edited today · Inbox · Orphan notes · Notes without tags · Unlinked mentions.

Build your own from eleven filter types (keyword, tag, folder, property, created, modified, status, type, has backlinks, has attachments, word count) combined with AND or OR, then pin and reorder them. Search is fuzzy, so projct still finds your project notes.

Underneath the results sit four contextual panels: On this day, Unlinked mentions (with one-click conversion to a real link), Stale notes, and Similar notes — the last scored locally from shared tags, shared links and title likeness, with no AI and no network.

Commands

All ten are available in the command palette and can be given hotkeys:

Open dashboard · Quick capture · Start triage · Run health scan · View inbox · View health · View find · Search notes · Toggle status bar · Restore last fix backup

Settings

General — turn each of the three modules on or off, ribbon and status bar visibility, log level, page size. Capture & inbox — inbox, archive and attachment-archive folders, default tags and type, folder auto-creation. Vault health — scan frequency, exclusions by folder/tag/file type, required properties, size threshold, per-detector switches, score weights, ignore lists. Smart retrieval — stale threshold, fuzzy sensitivity, results per page, archived-note visibility. Analytics — off by default; see below. About — version, links, and the action log of the last 100 things the plugin did.

Privacy

What the plugin reads

To do its job the plugin enumerates every file in your vault — vault.getFiles() and friends — and reads note contents. That is unavoidable for what it offers: you cannot find orphan notes without knowing every note and every link, or search without reading text. Concretely:

• File paths and metadata for all files, held in an in-memory index.
• Note contents, read lazily — only when a health scan, a search, or a preview needs them, never during startup.
• Attachments are only ever checked for references; their bytes are never read.

All of it stays on your device. There is no server, no telemetry endpoint, and no third party. If you would rather scope it down, Settings → Vault health lets you exclude folders, tags, and file types from scanning.

Everything else

• No network requests. Ever, for any core feature.
• Settings, saved views, ignore lists and the action log live in .obsidian/plugins/jemz-vault-assistant/data.json.
• Per-device UI state (such as having dismissed the welcome tour) uses local storage, so it never travels with a synced vault.
• Fix backups are written to <config>/plugins/jemz-vault-assistant/backups/, and the last ten are kept.
• Analytics are opt-in and off by default. If you turn them on, the plugin records anonymous counts only: which features were used, how long operations took, your platform, and a bucketed vault size. It never records note content, file names, folder names, tag names, links, or your vault path — and even then nothing is transmitted anywhere. Settings offers "view collected data" and "delete collected data".
• The plugin never downloads, updates or executes code outside a normal release.

FAQ

Will it change my notes without asking? No. Every write goes through a preview and an explicit confirmation, with a backup taken first. Cancelling the preview leaves every file byte-identical.

Why does the Health tab report so many orphan notes? An orphan is a note with no links in and none out. Fresh vaults have lots of them; that is normal, not an error. Unprocessed captures are excluded by default, and you can exclude folders or ignore individual findings.

Why is a note in my inbox folder still listed after I processed it? It should not be. Processing sets status: processed, which takes a note out of the inbox regardless of where it lives. If it persists, the file may have unparseable frontmatter — the Health tab will flag it.

It suggested merging two tags that are not the same word. Tag matching needs both a small edit distance and a shared three-character opening, which keeps unrelated pairs like meeting/testing apart. If something still looks wrong, tune the thresholds in settings or ignore that finding. Merging is never automatic.

Does it work on mobile? Yes. There are no Node.js APIs anywhere in the bundle, modals go full-screen so the keyboard cannot cover them, and touch targets meet the 44 px minimum. Obsidian does not render status bar items on mobile, so that one item is desktop-only.

Is it related to jemzsync? They are separate plugins in the same suite with no shared code or storage. If jemzsync is installed, this plugin can show its status; if not, nothing changes.

Development

npm install
npm run dev          # watch build
npm run build        # typecheck + production bundle
npm test             # 723 tests
npm run test:coverage
npm run test:perf    # benchmarks on 1k / 5k / 10k note vaults
npm run lint
npm run typecheck

Verified detector counts and the design decisions behind them are in TEST_VAULT_GROUND_TRUTH.md. Manual verification steps are in MANUAL_TEST_CHECKLIST.md, and the bug-fix history is in BUG_LOG.md.

test-vault/ is the fixture the integration tests run against; open it in Obsidian to reproduce the numbers by hand.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.