VaultDex

A retro-styled, relevance-scored full-text search engine for your Obsidian vault — inspired by the classic web search engines of the early internet.

Search your personal knowledge vault

Screenshots

Home page

Search results

Overview

VaultDex brings a fast, Google-style search experience to Obsidian. It opens as a full workspace tab, indexes your entire vault on load, and returns ranked results with highlighted snippets, breadcrumb paths, and clickable tags. Results can be filtered by PARA category and sorted by relevance or date.

The aesthetic is intentionally retro — think AltaVista meets your personal knowledge base.

Features

• Relevance-scored search — title, tag, header, and body matches are weighted and ranked
• Highlighted snippets — matching terms are highlighted in context in each result
• PARA category sidebar — filter results by Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive, and more with one click
• Clickable tags — click any tag on a result to browse all notes with that tag
• Sort by Relevance or Newest
• I'm Feeling Lucky — opens a random note from your vault
• Folder-scoped search — restrict results to a specific folder with FolderName:search terms syntax
• Phrase and AND search — supports quoted phrases and multi-word AND queries
• Theme-adaptive — uses Obsidian CSS variables; works with any community theme in light or dark mode
• Fast — index builds on vault load with no noticeable delay
• Mobile-compatible — isDesktopOnly: false

Installation

From Community Plugins (recommended)

1. Open Obsidian Settings → Community Plugins
2. Disable Restricted Mode if prompted
3. Click Browse and search for VaultDex
4. Click Install, then Enable

Manual

1. Download main.js, styles.css, and manifest.json from the latest release
2. Copy them into .obsidian/plugins/vaultdex/ in your vault
3. Enable the plugin under Settings → Community Plugins

Usage

Open VaultDex from the eye icon in the ribbon, or run Open VaultDex search from the Command Palette (Ctrl/Cmd+P).

VaultDex opens as a full workspace tab. Your vault index builds automatically in the background — the note count on the home page confirms when it's ready.

Home page

Results page

Search Syntax

Note: The folder name must appear at the start of the query followed by a colon. It is case-insensitive and matches any folder whose name contains the given string. The legacy folder:Name search syntax is also still supported.

Settings

Open Settings → VaultDex to configure:

Credits

VaultDex is inspired by the retro aesthetic of early web search engines. The scoring model is adapted from a custom TF-IDF-style ranker built for personal knowledge management.

Built with the Obsidian Plugin API.

License

MIT — see LICENSE