New Tab Pins
Joah Peng39 downloadsTurn every empty tab into a calm launcher for pinned notes, instant search, and recent files.
- Overview
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Turn every empty Obsidian tab into a calm launcher for your vault.
New Tab Pins puts search, important notes, and recent work in one focused home view—without making you build or maintain a dashboard note.
Community review: The plugin has been submitted to the Obsidian Community Plugin directory. Until the review is complete, install it with BRAT or from the latest GitHub release.
Why New Tab Pins
- Keep key notes one click away. Pin a Markdown file from its context menu or drag it onto the home view.
- Find notes immediately. Search Markdown files by title or path.
- Resume recent work. Jump back into recently modified notes.
- Stay focused. No statistics, widgets, or dashboard note to maintain.
- Keep your notes private. The plugin makes no network requests and never modifies note contents.
Install the public beta
BRAT
Install and enable the BRAT community plugin.
Run BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing from the command palette.
Paste this repository URL:
https://github.com/ptspzy/obsidian-new-tab-pinsEnable New Tab Pins in Settings → Community plugins.
Manual installation
Download manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css from the latest release, then copy them into:
<your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/new-tab-pins/
Reload Obsidian and enable New Tab Pins in Settings → Community plugins.
Use it
- Run New Tab Pins: Open home tab from the command palette.
- Pin a note from the file explorer context menu, or drag a Markdown file onto the pinned area.
- Drag pinned notes to reorder them.
- Search your vault or open a recently modified note from the same view.
Available commands:
- Open home tab
- Replace current tab with home
- Pin current file
- Unpin current file
Settings
- Home title and subtitle
- Automatically replace newly focused empty tabs
- Comfortable or compact layout density
- Starter pins used when no notes have been pinned yet
Privacy and data safety
New Tab Pins:
- does not connect to the internet;
- does not collect analytics;
- does not create, edit, rename, or delete notes;
- stores only its settings and pinned file paths in Obsidian's plugin data.
Compatibility
The custom home view and commands use stable Obsidian plugin APIs. Auto-open on empty tabs relies on Obsidian exposing blank tabs as an empty view type; if a future Obsidian update changes that behavior, disable the setting and open the home view from the command palette.
The plugin supports desktop and mobile. Drag-to-pin and drag-to-reorder are designed primarily for desktop use.
Development
This project uses pnpm:
pnpm install
pnpm dev
Run the complete pre-release gate:
pnpm release:check
Run the complete privacy gate, including the pinned Gitleaks binary:
pnpm privacy:full
Installing dependencies configures the versioned pre-commit hook in .githooks/.
The hook blocks unapproved author emails, local absolute paths, credential-shaped
values, private URL parameters, sensitive filenames, and unreviewed image changes.
Approved public identities, URL hosts, and reviewed image hashes live in
privacy-allowlist.json.
Stage the three files required by an Obsidian GitHub release:
pnpm release:stage
The assets are written to dist/.
Feedback
Found a bug or have a focused feature request? Open an issue.