Tray-Extended

Tray-Extended is a fork of dragonwocky's original Tray plugin. It can be used to launch the Obsidian app on system startup and run it in the background, adding global hotkeys and a tray menu to toggle window visibility and create quick notes from anywhere in your operating system.

Configuration

Window management

Option	Description	Default
Launch on startup	Open Obsidian automatically whenever you log into your computer.	Disabled
Hide on launch	Minimises Obsidian automatically whenever the app is launched. If the "Run in background" option is enabled, windows will be hidden to the system tray/menubar instead of minimised to the taskbar/dock.	Disabled
Run in background	Hide the app and continue to run it in the background instead of quitting it when pressing the window close button or toggle focus hotkey. Launching Obsidian again, including through an obsidian:// URI, restores and focuses hidden windows.	Disabled
Hide taskbar icon	Hides the window's icon from from the dock/taskbar. This may not work on Linux-based OSes.	Disabled
Create tray icon	Add an icon to your system tray/menubar to bring hidden Obsidian windows back into focus on click or force a full quit/relaunch of the app through the right-click menu.	Enabled
Tray icon image	Set the image used by the tray/menubar icon. Recommended size: 16x16
Tray icon tooltip	Set a title to identify the tray/menubar icon by. The {{vault}} placeholder will be replaced by the vault name.	{{vault}} | Obsidian
Toggle window focus hotkey	This hotkey is registered globally and will be detected even if Obsidian does not have keyboard focus. Format: Electron accelerator	CmdOrCtrl+Shift+Tab

The Relaunch Obsidian and Close Vault actions can be triggered from the tray/menubar context menu, or with the in-app command palette (search for "Tray: Relaunch Obsidian" or "Tray: Close Vault"). Hotkeys can be assigned to the commands via Obsidian's built-in hotkey manager.

If a global hotkey is unavailable, Tray-Extended shows a notice when it starts. A shortcut can only be registered by one application at a time. After migrating from the legacy Tray plugin, disable it before enabling Tray-Extended so it cannot retain the same global hotkeys.

URI shortcut

Tray-Extended registers these URI handlers:

URI	Behavior
obsidian://tray-extended/toggleWindows	Toggles vault-window visibility.
obsidian://tray-extended/showWindow	Ensures the vault window is visible and focused. It also cancels the one-time startup hide so the window remains visible during launch.
obsidian://tray-extended/showWindow?ignoreStartupHide=false	Ensures the vault window is visible but permits a pending startup hide to run.
obsidian://tray-extended/hideLeftSidebar	Collapses the left workspace sidebar. Safe to call repeatedly.

On Linux Wayland desktop environments, bind a system shortcut with xdg-open obsidian://tray-extended/showWindow.

Quick notes

Option	Description	Default
Quick note location	New quick notes will be placed in this folder.
Quick note date format	New quick notes will use a filename of this pattern. Format: Moment.js format string	YYYY-MM-DD
Quick note template	Optional vault-relative Markdown file. The field suggests notes in the vault; combined with the template mode it controls how the template is applied.
Quick note template mode	Controls how the configured template is applied: Ask each time (default), Always apply, or Never apply.	Ask each time
Quick note hotkey	This hotkey is registered globally and will be detected even if Obsidian does not have keyboard focus. Format: Electron accelerator	CmdOrCtrl+Shift+Q

The template is copied as-is. To use dynamic template expressions, install Templater and enable its trigger for new file creation.

Beta testing with BRAT

BRAT installs GitHub release assets rather than branch contents. Every push outside main starts the Beta Release workflow, which waits for approval before publishing a prerelease containing main.js and manifest.json. Configure the one-time approval gate in GitHub → Settings → Environments → beta-release by adding yourself as a required reviewer. A manual run can supply a custom prerelease version such as 1.0.11-beta.0; otherwise it derives one from manifest.json and the Actions run number. Add the repository to BRAT and select that prerelease. The normal release workflow only publishes from main.

Installation

Obsidian Marketplace

1. In Obsidian, navigate to Settings → Community plugins.
2. Press the Browse button beside the Community plugins option.
3. Search for Tray-Extended in the Filter text input.
4. Select Tray-Extended and press Install.
5. Once the plugin has finished installing, press Enable.
6. Press the Options button.
7. Configure the plugin as you wish.
8. You're done! 🎉

Manual

1. Download this repository.
2. Copy it into your vault's .obsidian/plugins/tray-extended directory.
3. In Obsidian, navigate to Settings → Community plugins.
4. Press Turn on community plugins if you haven't already.
5. Find Tray-Extended in the list of Installed plugins and toggle it on.
6. Press the ⚙️ button beside the toggle you just used.
7. Configure the plugin as you wish.
8. You're done! 🎉

Disclaimer

This plugin is provided as-is and is designed for personal use. It has not been tested on every platform and may not work as expected with all future updates. If you notice something is not working as intended, please open a bug report or pull request so it can be fixed.

The Obsidian logo is distributed with this plugin as the default image for the system tray/menubar icon, intended to be used within Obsidian. This logo remains the property of the Obsidian project and is not under the same license as the plugin's source code.