Quiet Shelf

Tuck archived notes out of the file explorer — without moving a single file. Then focus on just the folders you're working in.

Quiet Shelf does two things, both purely at the display layer of the file explorer. Your files never move, nothing is renamed, and the graph, search, backlinks and sync all keep working exactly as before.

Hide

Shelve a file or folder and it simply stops showing up in the explorer. Shelved items can be put back by hand at any time, and readme/inbox files can be auto-shelved by filename.

Items you have manually un-shelved stay un-shelved — the automatic rule will not grab them again.

Focus

Select folders and files across different levels of the tree, and only that set (plus its ancestors and descendants) stays visible. Focus sets can be saved under a name and recalled later.

Why

The file explorer is a browse surface, not an archive. Once a vault grows past a few hundred notes, the folders you finished months ago take up as much room as the ones you use daily. Quiet Shelf lets the tree show the working set without you having to reorganize the vault to get there.

How it works

Everything is done with DOM-level class toggling on the explorer's own tree items. The plugin reads data-path from each item's row and hides the corresponding subtree; it does not use fileItems, setCollapsed, or any other internal API, so it stays compatible across Obsidian updates.

Usage

Open the shelf panel from the ribbon icon, or run a command from the palette:

Command	What it does
Open shelf panel	Open the management panel
Batch manage	Shelve or restore several items at once
Toggle shelve	Shelve / restore the item under the cursor
Toggle focus	Turn focus mode on or off
Focus active folder	Focus the folder of the current note
Clear focus	Drop the current focus set
Save focus set	Save the current focus set under a name

Installation

Community plugins: search for "Quiet Shelf" in Settings → Community plugins.

Manual:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Put them in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/quiet-shelf/.
3. Enable the plugin under Settings → Community plugins.

Beta builds: add yunmin311/quiet-shelf-obsidian to BRAT.

Language

The settings page, commands, context-menu items, both modals and every notice are available in Chinese and English. Pick a language at the top of the settings page: Auto follows Obsidian's own language, or pin it to 简体中文 / English explicitly.

Adding another language is a pure data change — an extra entry in locales.js — with no build step involved.

Privacy

No network access. No telemetry. No accounts. The plugin reads only the file tree of the vault it runs in, and does not touch anything outside it.

Settings live in data.json inside the plugin folder, which is the same mechanism every Obsidian plugin uses for local settings.

License

MIT

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中文说明

暗格：把归档、索引类的文件从左侧文件树里收起来。文件本身不动 —— 物理位置、知识图谱、搜索、双链、同步全部照旧，只是不在树里显示了。 手动放回过的东西不会被自动规则再次收起。

聚焦：跨层级多选文件夹和文件，只留下选中组及其祖先与后代，可存成命名组合随时切换。

安装：在社区插件里搜 "Quiet Shelf"，或从 Release 下载三个文件放进 .obsidian/plugins/quiet-shelf/。