🌈 Colorful Folders for Obsidian

Transform your Obsidian file explorer from a dull list into a vibrant, organized, and high-performance visual dashboard. Colorful Folders automatically applies premium color palettes, smart icons, and structural intelligence to your vault. Whether you want a strictly organized, monochromatic workspace or a neon-glowing cyberpunk aesthetic, this plugin makes navigation intuitive and your workspace beautiful.

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🚀 Latest: 4.1.6 - The "CSS Variable Hook Engine" Update

4.1.6 introduces the new CSS Variable Hook Engine for zero-specificity customization, intelligent Color-Matched Multi-Selections, and complete theme stability updates. Full Changelog

🔌 1. Modern CSS Variable Hook Engine & Color-Matched Selections

• Dynamic Variable Hooks: Refactored the core Traversal Engine to wrap dynamic style assignments in standard CSS custom properties (like --cf-file-bg, --cf-folder-bg, etc.) to enable seamless, non-destructive overrides in your custom snippets without using !important.
• Color-Matched Multi-Selections: Introduced --cf-selection-bg to automatically shade multi-selected items with a translucent hue matching their parent folder's color, while cleanly falling back to match your accent color.
• Theme Stability & Compatibility: Removed hardcoded native fallbacks from the core styles.css sheet, ensuring seamless compatibility with premium third-party themes (like Minimal Theme) without clobbering native theme selection variables.

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✨ Core Features

🎨 Vivid Color & Visual Hierarchy

• Color-Coding Hierarchy: Automatically assigns distinct, beautiful colors to your top-level and nested folders.
• Visual Wayfinding: Uses glowing connector lines to create a clear "breadcrumb trail" to your currently active file.
• Stunning Built-in Palettes: Choose from preset themes like soft Pastel Dreams or high-contrast Neon Cyberpunk, or enter your own comma-separated hex codes for brand consistency.
• Smart Rainbow Logic: Cycle files independently through your palette for a full rainbow effect, or use the Adaptive Heatmap that seamlessly syncs with your chosen colors.
• Minimalist & Monochromatic Modes: Force subfolders to inherit their parent's color for strict organization, or use Outline Only Mode to remove background tints entirely while keeping the bright connecting lines.

🤖 Smart Iconography

• Auto-Icon Engine: Automatically detects folder and file names and injects high-fidelity Lucide/SVG icons based on categories (e.g., Journal -> 📅, Finance -> 💰, Tech -> 💻).
• Built-in Offline Libraries: Ships with 6 curated local icon sets (including Material, FontAwesome, and Vibrant packs) for instant, zero-latency styling without an internet connection.
• Enhanced Iconify Support: Import seamlessly from Iconify with perfect alignment, alias preservation, and custom offset support.
• Independent Icon Styling: Change icons and emojis without overriding your custom colors. Native icons are automatically replaced for a unified workspace.
• Universal 18px Sizing: All icons are standardized to a professional 18px baseline with perfect vertical centering across all themes and font sizes.

📁 Advanced Customization & Typography

• Individual File/Folder Styling: Right-click any item and select "Set Custom File Style" to override its color, icon, and text formatting.
• WYSIWYG Menu: The custom style modal intelligently pre-fills with the exact colors currently visible in your vault, sensitive to dark-mode brightness.
• Advanced Typography: Instantly make key projects stand out with bold and italic toggles, or custom text color overrides.
• Smart Inheritance: Force a specific style down an entire folder tree or instantly style all files within a folder to match its aesthetic.

📐 Organization & Spacing

• Section dividers: Add vertical visual dividers to group your files and folders. Includes Markdown support for rich descriptions in glassmorphic popovers and a dedicated smart editor. Features asymmetrical spacing (independent left/right gaps) and support for solid, dashed, or dotted lines.
• Dynamic item counters: Display recursive statistics showing the total count of folders and files contained within a directory, color-matched to their parent folder.
• Exclusion Lists: Keep utility directories like attachments or templates looking standard and unaffected by plugin styling.

🕵️ Stealth & Privacy Engine

• Visual Privacy: Hide any file or folder from the sidebar with a single click via the context menu.
• Ghost Mode: Toggle semi-transparent viewing of hidden items with a sleek blur effect.
• Password Protection: Secure your privacy settings with a custom Password Modal featuring shake animations for invalid attempts.
• Management Dashboard: A new "Privacy & stealth" card in settings to manage all hidden items and recovery options.

⚡ Performance & Visual Stability

• Cross-Platform Engine: Built for zero-lag performance with a robust CSS engine that works identically on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
• Static Premium Standards: All animations have been decommissioned in favor of hardcoded, high-performance static visual standards (e.g., Luminous Selection) to ensure zero GPU stutter.
• Vault Maintenance Tools: Includes one-click buttons to "Reset All Styling" or "Clear Icon Library", plus an Icon Debug Mode to track exactly how auto-icons are being applied.

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🛠️ Installation

Via Obsidian Community Plugins (Official & Recommended)

Colorful Folders is now officially available in the Obsidian Community Plugins gallery!

1. Open Obsidian and navigate to Settings > Community plugins.
2. Click Browse next to Community plugins.
3. Search for Colorful Folders.
4. Click Install, then click Enable.

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Via BRAT (For Beta Releases)

If you would like to test the absolute latest beta features, presets, and updates before they hit the main store, you can use BRAT:

1. Install the BRAT plugin from the Obsidian Community Plugins gallery.
2. Go to Settings > BRAT > Beta Plugin List.
3. Click Add Beta plugin.
4. Paste the repository URL: https://github.com/RohitNahar-Offical/colorful-folders-obsidian
5. Click Add Plugin.
6. Enable Colorful Folders under your Community plugins tab.

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💡 Pro Tip

You can access all styling configurations by navigating to Settings > Colorful Folders. Look for the large "💡 Pro Tip" banner at the top of the settings page for hidden tricks, including how to set up custom overriding colors!

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👨‍💻 Developer Documentation

If you are a developer looking to understand the internal architecture, contribute features, or debug the styling engine, please refer to our comprehensive technical guides:

• Developer Master Guide: The entry point for all technical documentation.
• Internal Engine Architecture: Deep dive into the rendering pipeline and logic flow.
• API Reference: Detailed class and method documentation.
• Customization Guide: Advanced CSS snippets and styling overrides.

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Developed with ❤️ by ROHIT-NAHAR