Vault Garden

Your vault as a living garden. Every note is a plant whose health reflects how recently you've touched it and how well it's connected — so at a glance you can see what's thriving and what needs tending.

Graph View tells you what links to what. Vault Garden tells you what needs tending. A flourishing, flowering plant is a note you edit often and link well. A big, browning tree is an important note you've neglected. A wilted sprout with moss creeping in is a stale orphan you can prune.

Nothing here is a separate game state you have to maintain — the garden is always a true reflection of your vault's real metadata. Edit a note and it perks back up; ignore one and it slowly, gently wilts (logarithmically — a note untouched for a year gets weedy, it never "dies"). Everything is local; no backend, no telemetry.

Features

The living garden — a beautiful, at-a-glance read on vault health.

• Painterly, procedurally drawn plants in five species (bush, flower, tree, fern, succulent), each assigned per note.
• Freshness ramps a plant's palette green → brown and droops it; connectivity drives its size and stature. A big, brown, drooping plant = important but neglected.
• Notes clump by folder into nested soil beds (subfolders nest inside their parent), on a grassy world with a picket fence and folder signposts.
• Hover any plant for a card: title (click to open), a plain-English state, and stats (last edited, link count).
• Ambient sway and seasonal weather — drifting leaves, snow, petals or pollen, by the real date or your choice.
• Pan and zoom the garden (drag / scroll / buttons); it fills the pane instead of shrinking as your vault grows.

Tend it — gardening gestures that map to real vault operations.

• Drag a plant to another bed to move the note to that folder (subfolders included).
• Shed → archive the note. Compost → send it to trash (with a confirm).
• Watering can → refresh a note's freshness without opening it — drop a plant on the can, or pick the can up as a tool and click plants.
• Arrange your garden: free-place plants and drag whole beds by their signpost; your layout is saved. A reset button restores the auto-layout.

Make it yours — theme packs.

• Built-in themes: Verdant, Dusk, Amber. Switch live in settings.
• Drop your own palette packs (a JSON of colours) or sprite packs (bring-your-own plant/structure art) into the plugin's themes/ folder. See docs/THEME-PACKS.md.

Keep it focused — decide what's in the garden and when it opens.

• Ignore files & folders — search your vault and exclude specific folders or files; excluding a folder hides everything nested inside it.
• Ignore tag — hide any note carrying a tag (default #garden-hide, in frontmatter or inline). Case-insensitive, and the tag word is configurable.
• Open garden on startup — open the garden automatically when Obsidian starts.

Gallery

Five plant species, each shown fresh and wilting — the same note greens and stands upright when you edit it, then browns and droops as it goes stale:

Seasonal atmosphere — a subtle tint plus drifting particles (spring petals, summer pollen, autumn leaves, winter snow), by the real date or your choice:

Theme packs re-skin the whole garden — the three built-in themes below, plus palette or sprite packs you drop into the themes/ folder:

Install

Manual install (until it's on the community list):

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/vault-garden/.
3. Enable Vault Garden in Settings → Community plugins.

Open the garden from the ribbon (the sprout icon) or the command palette (Vault Garden: Open garden).

Usage

Settings let you tune the scoring (freshness half-life, connectivity saturation), the archive folder, the season, the theme, and update debounce.

Keep notes out of the garden, and choose when it opens:

• Ignore files & folders — search your vault and exclude specific folders or files. Excluding a folder hides everything nested inside it.
• Ignore tag — hide any note carrying a tag (default #garden-hide, set in frontmatter or inline). Change the tag word or leave it blank to disable; matching is case-insensitive.
• Open garden on startup — open the garden automatically when Obsidian starts.

How health is computed

Two independent axes, each normalised to 0..1:

• Freshness — 0.5 ^ (daysSinceModified / halfLifeDays). Drops fast then flattens; never reaches zero.
• Connectivity — min(1, links / saturation). Saturating, so a hub isn't ten times an averagely-linked note.

Freshness drives vitality (colour, droop, wilt); connectivity drives stature (size); together they pick a stage (seed → sprout → growing → flowering → wilting). See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Development

npm install
npm run dev      # esbuild watch — rebuilds main.js on change
npm test         # unit tests (pure model + layout)
npm run build    # type-check + production bundle

Symlink the repo into a test vault to try it live:

ln -s "$(pwd)" /path/to/YourVault/.obsidian/plugins/vault-garden

The codebase is built to be forked — pure domain logic, a single Obsidian adapter, and Renderer / Layout seams. Start with docs/ARCHITECTURE.md, then docs/CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev loop and extension recipes.

Roadmap

Phases 1–3 are complete. On the backlog (unscheduled — contributions welcome):

• Deeper visual customization — a pack manager, themeable structures and backgrounds, and mapping plant species by tag/folder.
• Custom weather — tunable particles and density, and weather that responds to vault activity.
• Performance at scale — viewport culling and a Canvas renderer for very large vaults.

Full list in docs/ROADMAP.md.

Documentation

• Architecture — data flow, seams, scoring.
• Roadmap — what's built, phase by phase.
• Contributing — dev setup + how to extend.
• Theme packs — palette and sprite pack formats.
• Concept brief — the original pitch.

License

MIT © Declan Holmes-Carr