Vault Changelog

Maintain a changelog of recently edited notes in Obsidian.

Originally created by Badr Bouslikhin.

The changelog note is entirely overwritten on each update. Use a dedicated note and embed it elsewhere if you need historical tracking.

Installation

1. Open Settings in Obsidian.
2. Navigate to Community plugins > Browse.
3. Search for "Changelog".
4. Install and enable the plugin.

Requires Obsidian 1.13 or later. Older versions of Obsidian install 1.8.0.

Maintenance

Vault Changelog is in maintenance mode. It gets bug fixes and changes users ask for, and no new features otherwise. Open an issue to report a problem or ask for a change.

Troubleshooting

The plugin will not install or update

Most often reported on Windows, and usually the plugin files could not be replaced while Obsidian had them open. Try these in order — the first two resolve it most of the time:

1. Restart Obsidian. The files may have been written correctly despite the error.
2. Disable the plugin first. Settings → Community plugins → toggle Vault Changelog off, update, then toggle it back on.
3. Uninstall and reinstall.
4. Install by hand with Obsidian closed. Download main.js and manifest.json from the latest release into .obsidian/plugins/obsidian-vault-changelog/ in your vault.

If none of that works, something is likely holding the files open. Real-time antivirus scanning, file-sync clients (OneDrive, Dropbox, Syncthing) and backup plugins all do this. Pausing them before updating is worth a try.

Reporting a problem

Please include the output from the developer console — Ctrl+Shift+I (Cmd+Option+I on macOS), then the Console tab — captured while the failure happens, along with your operating system and Obsidian version. Installation failures look alike from the outside, and the console is what separates a file that could not be written from one that could not be downloaded.

Usage

• Manual: Command palette > Vault Changelog: Update changelog
• Automatic: Enable in settings; the changelog updates shortly after a note is created, modified, renamed, or deleted.

Rename or move the changelog note and the setting follows it. Rename it to something other than a markdown file and the plugin says so, leaves that file alone, and keeps writing to the configured path.

Example Output

- 2025-01-28T1430 · [[Note Title]]
- 2025-01-28T1425 · [[Another Note]]

With wiki-links disabled, [[Note Title]] becomes Note Title. With a heading configured, the heading appears above the list.

Notes that share a filename are told apart by their path: a wiki-link includes as much of the path as Obsidian needs, and with wiki-links disabled the row shows the full path.

What this plugin accesses

• Your notes' names, paths and modification times. It never reads a note's content.
• The changelog note. It reads it only to skip a write that would change nothing, and replaces it in full otherwise. If the folder in the changelog path does not exist, it creates it.
• Its own settings, in data.json in the plugin's folder.

It makes no network requests and collects nothing.

Settings

Alternatives

• Bases — built-in Obsidian feature for querying and displaying vault data
• Recent Files — sidebar pane of recently opened files
• List Modified — links modified files to daily, weekly, or monthly notes
• Dataview — dynamic query: TABLE dateformat(file.mtime, "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm") SORT file.mtime DESC LIMIT 25