🌲 Vault Tree — Structural Navigation for Obsidian

Vault Tree turns your folder hierarchy into a living, navigable knowledge map.

It gives you:

• A true tree view of your entire vault
• A recursive system of Table-of-Contents notes that link everything together
• A way to use Obsidian’s Graph View to visualize structure, not just links

Your folders stop being storage. They become part of your knowledge graph.

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🖼️ Overview

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✨ What Vault Tree Does

🌳 1) Vault-Wide Tree Panel

A dedicated side panel that shows your entire vault structure as a clean tree:

• Folders always listed before files
• Click any note to open it
• Updates automatically when the vault changes
• Much clearer structural overview than the default file explorer for large vaults

This is your structural map of the vault.

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📄 2) Recursive Table-of-Contents Generator

With one click, Vault Tree generates a table-of-content.md file inside every folder.

Each TOC contains:

• Links to all notes in that folder
• Links to the TOCs of all child folders

This creates a self-linking hierarchy across your entire vault.

You can now:

• Navigate your vault through TOCs
• Use Graph View to see folder relationships
• Publish your vault with built-in structure
• Treat folders as first-class knowledge nodes

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🧠 Why This Is Powerful

As vaults grow, folders alone stop being useful for navigation.

Vault Tree fixes this by turning your structure into something you can:

• See
• Click through
• Visualize
• Traverse like a knowledge map

You don’t browse files anymore. You navigate structure.

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🖱 How to Use

After enabling the plugin, you’ll see two ribbon icons:

Icon	Action
🌳	Open the Vault Tree panel
➕	Generate table-of-content.md files across the vault

Run the TOC generator once and your vault becomes permanently self-indexing.

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📁 Example

If your vault looks like this:

Projects/
  Alpha.md
  Beta.md
  Research/
    Paper.md

Vault Tree generates:

Projects/table-of-content.md

# Projects

## Files
- [[Alpha]]
- [[Beta]]

## Subfolders
- [[Projects/Research/table-of-content]]

Projects/Research/table-of-content.md

# Research

## Files
- [[Paper]]

These TOCs then link to each other — forming a structural graph.

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🛠 Installation (Development)

Clone into your vault’s plugins folder:

<your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/vault-tree

Install dependencies and build:

npm install
npm run build

Then enable Vault Tree in:

Obsidian → Settings → Community Plugins

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💻 Development

Run TypeScript in watch mode:

npm run dev

Reload plugins inside Obsidian after changes.

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🚀 Roadmap

Planned improvements:

• Collapsible folders in the tree
• Highlight the currently open file
• Match Obsidian File Explorer icons
• Auto-regenerate TOCs when files change
• Sorting and filtering options

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🧩 License

Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

You may use and modify this plugin, but not sell or use it commercially. Attribution is required.

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🙌 Contributing

Issues, ideas, and pull requests are welcome.

If you like the concept, help make it even better.