Hearth

Hearth

A beautiful, customizable home screen for Obsidian — search, dashboard, and launcher in one. Hearth gives your vault a welcoming front page: a big search field, quick file-type filters, a new-note button, and a grid of cards that embed notes, images, bases, bookmarks and quick text.

Status: v0.9 — the top section and a fully arrangeable card dashboard (drag, resize, collision-aware packing, on-board card management, templates, per-card colors, web embeds, live auto-refreshing, zoomable and editable embeds, Excalidraw and canvas cards, multiple switchable dashboards with per-board overrides, pinned cards, a search-only mobile mode, layout import/export) are in. See Roadmap for what's next.

Screenshots

Features

Top section

• Customizable title / logo — set any title text and an emoji/short logo.
• Vault search — fuzzy search across your whole vault (the .obsidian config folder is ignored automatically). Keyboard friendly: ↑/↓ to move, Enter to open, Esc to dismiss.
• Auto-detected filters — file-type filter chips are generated from what actually lives in your vault, grouped sensibly (Notes, Images, Videos, Sheets, Slides, Documents, Folders, Canvas, Bases…), each with a fitting icon. Hide any you don't want in settings.
• New note button — creates a note in your configured default location.
• Optional background — solid color, a vault image, or an image URL, with opacity and blur controls.

Dashboard cards

• Embed — embed a note (.md), image, canvas, or .base file. Rendered through Obsidian's own renderer, so anything Obsidian (or the Bases plugin) can embed, a card can show. Each embed has a zoom control to scale its content up or down to fit the card, and Markdown notes can be made editable in place — edits save straight back to the vault.
• Excalidraw & canvas cards — dedicated templates for embedding an Excalidraw drawing or a .canvas file, with a friendly prompt when the required plugin isn't enabled.
• Daily note — always shows today's daily note (resolved from the core Daily notes plugin's date format and folder), with a one-click prompt to create it when it doesn't exist yet. Optionally editable in place.
• Web page — embed any http(s) URL in a sandboxed iframe.
• Live content — embed and web cards can auto-refresh on an interval, so a card tracking a frequently-edited note or a live page stays up to date.
• Bookmarks — pulls from Obsidian's core Bookmarks plugin.
• Favorites — a grid of curated note cards.
• Recent files — your recently opened files (configurable count).
• Links / launchpad — a grid of tiles opening notes, URLs or commands.
• Commands — tiles that run any command-palette command, with an adjustable button size.
• Clock & greeting — a live time-of-day greeting, clock and date.
• Text / jot-down — a quick scratch field saved with the card, rendered as Markdown (double-click to edit).

Multiple dashboards

• Switcher — a [1] [2] [+] row in the top-left switches between boards and adds new ones. Give a board an emoji/icon to label its button instead of a number. Right-click a button for dashboard settings (name, icon, overrides) or to delete it.
• Per-dashboard overrides — each board can override the global grid columns, row height and background, or fall back to the defaults.
• Pinned cards — pin any card to show it on every dashboard, sharing one definition and position across boards.
• Keyboard shortcuts — commands to jump to a dashboard by position (Switch to dashboard 1…9) and to move to the next/previous dashboard. Bind them under Settings → Hotkeys (e.g. Ctrl/Cmd+1).

Arranging the dashboard

• Drag & resize — hit Arrange to move cards (drag anywhere) and resize them (corner handle); everything snaps to the grid and is saved. Cards push each other out of the way as you drag and compact upward when you let go.
• On-board management — in arrange mode each card header is editable: rename inline, swap the embedded file via a fuzzy picker, or remove the card. Add card (toolbar) drops in a new card from the library.
• Per-card colors — give any card an accent and a background tint.
• Granular sizing — numeric width/height per card, plus a configurable row height so cards can be sized finely.
• Import / export — back up or share the active board's layout as JSON.
• The dashboard can either scroll or be locked to a single page.

Mobile

• Mobile mode — an optional search-only launcher: on phones and tablets the dashboard collapses to just the search field (desktop is unaffected).

Usage

• Hearth opens automatically on startup and replaces empty new tabs (both toggleable in settings).
• Open it any time from the ribbon home icon or the command “Open home dashboard”.
• Configure everything under Settings → Hearth.

Development

npm install      # install dependencies
npm run dev      # watch build -> main.js
npm run build    # typecheck + production build

To test in a vault, symlink or copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/hearth/.

Roadmap

• Drag & resize cards on a free-form grid (custom lightweight engine)
• More card types (recent, links/launchpad, commands, clock)
• Per-card backgrounds and accent colors
• Card library / templates
• Best-effort Bases (.base) embedding (depends on the core Bases plugin)
• Manage embeds from the dashboard — add, remove, swap embedded files and rename cards directly on the board, fully driven by the user
• Filter click expands a match menu — clicking a search filter drops down the matching items immediately
• Excalidraw filter — dedicated file-type filter for Excalidraw drawings
• "Other" filter — catch-all for every file not matched by any other filter
• Collision-aware auto-packing while dragging
• Inline web/iframe embeds
• Import/export dashboard layouts
• Configure cards on the board — every per-card setting (type, title, content, colors and size) is edited from the card itself in arrange mode, not in the settings tab
• More granular card sizing — numeric width & height inputs per card
• Customizable clock — 24-hour time, seconds, greeting toggle/override and date display mode
• .usheet (Univer Sheet) support — recognized as spreadsheets in the file-type filters
• Compact spacing — toggle to tighten card padding and the top margin
• Bookmark favicons — show site favicons next to URL bookmarks
• Real app icon — used for the ribbon, tab and header logo (shipped in the bundle)
• Commands card — tiles that run chosen command-palette commands
• Mobile search — results float as an overlay so they no longer push the dashboard off-screen on phones
• Live cards — per-card auto-refresh interval for embed and web cards
• Embed zoom — per-card scale control for embedded content
• Editable .md embeds — a per-card toggle to edit an embedded note in place; edits save straight back to the vault
• Excalidraw drawing card — dedicated card template for embedding an Excalidraw drawing, with a prompt to install the plugin when it's missing
• Canvas card — dedicated card template for embedding a .canvas file, with a prompt to enable the core Canvas plugin when it's off
• Multiple dashboards — several switchable boards, managed from the [1] [2] [+] switcher in the top-left (right-click a button for settings or delete)
• Per-dashboard overrides — columns, row height and background can be set per board, falling back to the global defaults
• Per-dashboard icon — an emoji/short text on the switcher button instead of a number
• Pinned cards — show a card on every dashboard, shared across boards
• Dashboard keyboard shortcuts — switch to a board by position, or next/previous (bindable in Settings → Hotkeys)
• Mobile mode — an option to collapse to just the search field on phones and tablets, leaving the dashboard for desktop
• Granular row height — a Row height setting for finer control over how tall cards can be
• Command tile size — adjustable button size on the commands card
• Daily note card — always embeds today's daily note, with a prompt to create it when missing

Planned

Bigger ideas

• Reorder dashboards in the switcher (drag the buttons)
• Per-board fit-to-page / max-width overrides

License

MIT © ondreu