Notebook Navigator

by Johan Sanneblad
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Score: 73/100
Description

The Notebook Navigator plugin replaces the default file explorer with a notes-style dual-pane interface that prioritises fast navigation and visual organisation. It presents a hierarchical folder and tag tree alongside a configurable file list, supports keyboard-first workflows, multi-selection, drag-and-drop, and pinning to streamline file operations. Visual features include note previews, feature-image thumbnails, date grouping and customizable appearances per folder or tag, plus extensive theming support and RTL layout handling. The plugin scales to very large vaults through virtualised rendering and IndexedDB caching, and exposes a public API for scripts and other plugins. Mobile and desktop interactions are considered equally, making it a full-featured alternate navigator for users who prefer a more structured, themeable file browser.

Reviews
  • Uwe Wennmann
    Reviewed on Nov 25th, 2025
    No review text provided.
  • Johan Sanneblad
    Reviewed on Nov 24th, 2025
    No review text provided.
Stats
1242
stars
184,831
downloads
27
forks
93
days
1
days
10
days
66
total PRs
0
open PRs
10
closed PRs
56
merged PRs
583
total issues
10
open issues
573
closed issues
0
commits
Latest Version
11 days ago
Changelog

Lots of internal improvements in this release. The mobile drag and drop functionality was rewritten from the ground up, pattern matching for hidden folders and tags was greatly improved in performance, and lots of other internal improvements.

Thank you all the feedback and suggestions, and thank you for using Notebook Navigator!

New

  • New setting: Navigation pane > Behavior > Pin recent notes with shortcuts. Enable this to pin both shortcuts and recent notes to the top of the navigation pane. Default disabled.
  • New style setting: Navigation file text color (--nn-theme-navitem-file-name-color). Customize the color of files shown in shortcuts and recent files in navigation pane.

Improved

  • Creating new Excalidraw and Tldraw documents now use the names and templates configured in each plugin's settings.
  • Drag and drop finally works on all Android devices! 🎉 Due to persistent issues with HTML5 drag-and-drop on certain Android devices, the entire mobile drag-and-drop implementation for shortcuts and reorder root items was rebuilt from the ground up to use the library dnd-kit, https://github.com/clauderic/dnd-kit.
  • Android users can now swipe in the middle of the view to go from list pane to navigation pane.
  • File operations like move, delete, create, pin/unpin now keeps current list scroll position when nothing is selected in the list pane.
  • Notebook Navigator now also supports AVIF images for image previews in list pane.

Changed

  • Active vault profile is no longer synced between devices, so you can have different active vault profiles on different devices.
  • Moved zoom level, tag sort order, recent colors, search provider and release check timestamp from synced settings to local storage. Settings file is now only used for configuration settings, not UX state.
  • Significantly optimized hidden folder and hidden tag pattern matching performance.

Fixed

  • Creating new notes with "Reading mode" enabled prevented the plugin Templater from inserting templates. This has been fixed by always opening new notes in "Editing mode", just like the built-in file explorer does it.
README file from
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