Color Tags

Color Tags

Tag folders and notes with color from the file explorer's right-click menu, using the seven familiar macOS Finder colors plus five vibrant additions.

Get it on the Obsidian community plugin page.

Why this exists

Plenty of plugins will color your file explorer. Most of them do it by stacking their own CSS on top of your theme — a pill shape here, a border there — and the result is that a colored item stops looking like it belongs in the list.

Color Tags is built the other way around. It sets Obsidian's own --nav-item-* custom properties on the row and then gets out of the way, so Obsidian paints the resting, hover, active and selected states itself, with your theme's radius, padding and spacing. A tagged row and an untagged row are identical in every dimension — only the color differs.

Features

• Finder colors, plus five more. Start with the familiar macOS palette, then use teal, cyan, indigo, black and brown for more categories.
• Tint, not decoration. The item's name is colored, with a subtle wash behind the row. No dots, no badges, no pills.
• Folder chevrons take the color too, so they stay legible against the tint.
• Your theme is left alone. Nothing about a row's shape, size or spacing changes when you tag it.
• Tags follow their files. Rename a note, move it, rename a whole parent folder — the color goes with it, including everything nested inside.
• Works everywhere Obsidian does. Desktop and mobile; mobile gets a swatch picker dialog instead of a submenu.

The colors

Usage

1. Right-click a folder or note in the file explorer.
2. Hover Color tag and pick a color.
3. To clear it, right-click again → Color tag → Remove color.

Installing

Community plugins

Search for Color Tags in Settings → Community plugins → Browse, or install directly from the plugin page.

BRAT

Install BRAT, then add markosnarinian/obsidian-color-tags as a beta plugin. BRAT keeps it updated as new releases ship.

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Put all three in <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/color-tags/.
3. Enable Color Tags in Settings → Community plugins.

Release assets carry build provenance attestations, so you can confirm they were built from this repository by its release workflow before installing:

gh attestation verify main.js -R markosnarinian/obsidian-color-tags

Notes

This plugin does not read or write real macOS Finder tags. It borrows Finder's palette because those colors are familiar, but the tags live in your vault, not in the filesystem. Nothing on disk is modified, and the plugin behaves identically on Windows, Linux and mobile.

Tags are stored in the plugin's own data.json, keyed by vault path. Your notes' contents are never touched.

Development

npm install
npm run dev    # watch build
npm run build  # type-check, then emit a minified main.js

Source lives in src/. The main.js at the repo root is a build output — it is not tracked in git, and ships as a GitHub release asset.

Credits

Color Tags is a fork of Color Marker by Central Brain Trust (centralbraintrust.com), released under the MIT license. The context-menu integration, path-keyed storage and rename/move tracking are its work, and this fork would not exist without it.

This fork uses the macOS Finder palette plus five additional colors, drops the colored dot, stops the plugin from altering the shape of file explorer rows, tints folder chevrons, and moves the source to TypeScript.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. The original author's copyright is retained alongside this fork's.