Unhidden

An Obsidian plugin that reveals hidden dot-folders (.claude, .github, .vscode, and friends) inside your vault. Revealed folders show up in the file explorer, search, the metadata cache, and Bases, and stay live as files change on disk. Nothing on disk is ever modified: revealing and hiding only changes what Obsidian indexes.

Features

• Reveal any hidden folder or file: toggle vault-root dot-entries from settings, reveal a nested hidden path like projects/.notes, or reveal a single dotfile like .env.
• Eager indexing: the full folder tree is registered the moment you reveal it, including deeply nested sub-folders.
• Live updates: a recursive watcher keeps revealed folders in sync as files are created, changed, or deleted.
• New-path alerts: a lightweight watcher on the vault root notices freshly created hidden folders/files and nudges you to reveal them.
• File-type control: index only an allowlist of extensions (the default), or flip to indexing every file type.
• Exclusions: folder names like node_modules are skipped wherever they appear, so revealing .expo or a project folder doesn't flood your index.
• Command palette: Reveal a hidden folder, Hide a revealed folder (both with fuzzy pickers), and Rescan revealed folders.

How it works

Obsidian has no public API for indexing hidden paths, so the plugin calls (and patches) a small set of undocumented methods on the desktop FileSystemAdapter (reconcileFolderCreation, reconcileFileInternal, reconcileDeletion, and the listRecursiveChild / reconcileFile entry points). All patches are guarded, installed only while at least one folder is revealed, and fully restored on unload. This also means the plugin is desktop only.

Development

npm install
npm run dev    # unminified build with inline sourcemaps
npm run build  # typecheck + minified production build

The build bundles src/main.ts into main.js with esbuild. Copy (or symlink) main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/unhidden/ and enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Layout

File	Role
src/main.ts	Plugin entry point: lifecycle, commands, settings persistence
src/reveal-engine.ts	Core: reveals/conceals folders, eager tree indexing, adapter patches
src/vault-internals.ts	Typed surface of the undocumented adapter methods
src/settings.ts	Settings shape, defaults, legacy-format migration, input parsing
src/settings-tab.ts	Settings UI
src/folder-pick-modal.ts	Fuzzy folder picker used by the commands

License

MIT — see LICENSE.