Quiet Desk

A glass card desk for Obsidian. One install: the homepage becomes rooms of cards, and the vault picks up the mint Quiet Glass look.

Chinese name: 静桌. Desk title defaults to 格物成栖 (you can change it).

Formerly An Tou. Plugin id stays an-tou so existing installs keep their data.json and desk tabs.

Requires Obsidian 1.7.2 or newer.

What it does

• Opens on a card desk instead of the file tree
• Each card is a folder you configure (a room)
• A room with children and no notes grid is a group, like a cabinet
• Notes inside a room stay cards
• Home + adds a card. Open a room — the + there writes a note
• Applies the Quiet Glass look (three separate switches, see below)

First run

A new vault opens on a welcome page. It says what the plugin changed, confirms your notes and folders were not touched, and lets you pick which top-level folders go on the home grid — six are pre-selected, and Add all maps every folder and its subfolders the way older versions did automatically.

Vaults that already have rooms skip the welcome page entirely.

Settings

Settings default to Chinese. Switch to English at the top of the page — the desk itself follows, including the date format.

Desk

• Desk title — home heading and tab (default: 格物成栖)
• Mint palette — desk paper, glass cards, and chrome. Off uses your current theme everywhere
• Serif type — desk titles, card names, and note text. Off uses your theme fonts
• Hide the ribbon — off shows the left icon bar; on hides it
• Open on start — show the desk when the vault opens
• Collapse file explorer — off shows the left file tree; on folds it
• Skip these paths — comma-separated folder prefixes hidden from cards and recents (attachments is there by default)

Rooms

Rooms are grouped: home cards first, then each nested group under its parent. Each room collapses to one line. Click the line to edit.

• Name — large title on the card
• Folder — vault path, with autocompletion; a path that does not exist says so and suggests the closest match. Empty makes a group
• Top-left text — small line at the card's top-left
• Caption — sentence under the title
• Put inside this room — a dropdown of room names. Anything that would make a cycle (the room itself, its descendants) is left out
• Max notes shown — how many note cards this room shows at most
• Fade the card — the card fades and its notes stay out of recents

Deleting a room asks first and says where its children go — back to the home grid, never deleted with it.

Build from top-level folders keeps names, captions, and toggles you already edited. Rooms whose folder has disappeared are flagged rather than removed.

Install

Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into:

<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/an-tou/

Enable Quiet Desk under Community plugins.

npm install
npm run build

Publish

Push a version tag that matches manifest.json (no v prefix). GitHub Actions builds the plugin, signs artifact attestations, and creates the release:

git tag 0.3.0
git push origin 0.3.0

Then submit or re-request review at community.obsidian.md.

Plugin id: an-tou (former name An Tou). The store name has to stay English / Basic Latin: Quiet Desk.