Vault Full Statistics

Vault Full Statistics Plugin

NOTE: This plugin is a modified fork of the Obsidian Vault Statistics Plugin.

Quantify the shape of your knowledge base: counts, ratios, and trends right inside Obsidian. A click-to-cycle status bar item gives you the headline numbers; a dedicated side view goes deep — own vs source split, dangling sources, tangles, inbox health, taxonomy drift, and a 30-day sparkline.

Requires: Obsidian 0.16.0+ on desktop. Mobile is not supported.

Features

Status bar

• Notes, links, tags, QoV (Quality of Vault = links ÷ notes)
• Own / source counts and percentages
• Concepts and orphans (no incoming links)
• Trace percentage (share of source notes referenced by at least one own note)
• Click to cycle, hover to see everything at once
• CSS snippets to show several stats simultaneously (see Advanced Usage)

Side view (Open vault statistics command)

• Hero panel — notes, total words, QoV in big readable type
• Own vs source ratio bar — your thinking vs external material, with concepts as a grey zone
• Metrics grid — links, tags, concepts, orphans, average words per note (each toggleable)
• Sources with trace — how many source notes are linked from your own notes; surfaces dangling sources as clickable pills
• Inbox health — notes in inbox folders or tagged for review, bucketed by age (<1d / 1–7d / 7–30d / 30+d)
• Folder breakdown — PARA-style groups with own/source split per group
• Tag taxonomy drift — rare tags (likely typos) and tags outside your canonical set
• 30-day history sparkline — daily snapshots of notes, own, source, links, tags, orphans, traced

Tangles

A "tangle" is a note that bridges large parts of your graph — many incoming links, many outgoing links, or both. The plugin can:

• List tangles in a dedicated Open vault tangles side view, sorted by selected mode (AND / OR / SUM thresholds)
• Generate a Markdown report note via Create tangles report note, dropped into a configurable folder

CSV export

Export statistics history to CSV opens the native OS save dialog (with an in-vault folder picker fallback) and writes the full history snapshot stream as CSV — for use in spreadsheets, Jupyter, or anything else.

Installation

Recommended — Obsidian Community Plugins: the plugin is published in the official Obsidian community plugin catalog. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for Vault Full Statistics, click Install, then Enable. Updates are delivered through Obsidian itself.

For pre-releases (testing unreleased features), use BRAT: add jtprogru/obsidian-vault-full-statistics-plugin and enable it.

Manual install: grab the latest main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the release section and drop them into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/vault-full-statistics/.

This plugin is desktop-only.

Usage

After enabling, the status bar shows a count. Click to cycle through statistics; hover to see all of them in a tooltip. Toggle which statistics are visible in the plugin settings.

Open the side view via Open vault statistics (command palette or ribbon icon). Sections beyond the hero are opt-in — enable Folder breakdown, Sources-with-trace, Inbox health, Tag taxonomy drift, and History in settings to surface them.

For own/source classification, configure your own/source/concept tags in settings (defaults: thought, book, concept, etc.). Any note carrying one of those tags is counted accordingly.

Settings reference

All settings live under Settings → Community plugins → Vault Full Statistics. Defaults are sensible — most users only touch own/source tags and the opt-in section toggles.

Status bar

• Show individual items — when on, every enabled statistic is rendered as its own status bar slot; when off (default) the bar shows one statistic at a time and clicking cycles. Below toggles apply when this is on.
• Show notes / links / tags / quality / own / source / own % / source % / concepts / orphans / trace % — visibility of each individual status bar stat.

Metrics section (side view)

Toggle which secondary metrics appear in the side view's grid below the hero panel:

• Links, Tags, Concepts, Orphans, Avg words — all on by default.

Classification

• Excluded folders — folders to skip entirely (templates, archives, plugin data). Matched as path prefix with a / boundary.
• Own tags (default: thought, synthesis, fleeting) — mark notes as your own thinking.
• Source tags (default: book, article, video, lecture, literature, literature-note) — mark notes about external material.
• Concept tags (default: concept) — the grey zone between own and source.

Folder breakdown (PARA)

• Show folder breakdown (default: off) — opt-in section that breaks down notes per folder group.
• Folder groups — one row per group, name = path1, path2. Multiple paths per group are merged; overlap allowed.

Sources with trace

• Show sources-with-trace (default: off) — opt-in section showing how many source notes are referenced by at least one own note.
• Show dangling notes list (default: on) — top 5 untraced source notes inside the section.

Tag taxonomy drift

• Show taxonomy drift (default: off) — opt-in section listing rare tags and tags outside your canonical set.
• Rare tag threshold (default: 3) — tags used fewer than this many times are flagged.
• Canonical tags — your accepted tag set. Anything else is flagged as unknown; a canonical parent (e.g. journal) covers descendants (journal/daily).

Inbox health

• Show inbox health (default: off) — opt-in section bucketing inbox notes by age.
• Inbox folders — folders treated as inbox.
• Inbox review tags (default: inbox/review) — tags marking notes that need processing outside inbox folders.

History

• Show history (default: off) — opt-in 30-day sparkline. Snapshots are recorded daily regardless of this toggle.
• History export folder — last folder used for CSV export. The export command updates this on use.

Tangles

• Selection mode (default: AND) — AND (both directions must meet threshold), OR (either direction), SUM (in + out must meet a single threshold).
• Min incoming links / Min outgoing links (default: 5 each) — thresholds for AND/OR modes.
• Min in + out (default: 10) — threshold for SUM mode.
• Top N (default: 25) — limit how many tangles to show in the view and report. 0 means no limit.
• Tangles report folder — where Create tangles report note saves its output. Empty = vault root.
• Tangles exclude — notes (full path) or folder prefixes to skip in tangle detection. Folder match requires a trailing slash boundary.

FAQ / Troubleshooting

What is QoV? Quality of Vault = total links ÷ total notes. A measure of how interconnected your vault is. There's no objective "good" value; track the trend instead.

Why does the notes count differ from Obsidian's File pane? The plugin counts Markdown notes only and skips Excalidraw drawings and Kanban boards (they're file containers, not text). It also skips excluded folders configured in settings. If a number still looks off, check whether your vault contains .excalidraw.md files or notes with excalidraw-plugin / kanban-plugin in frontmatter.

The side view is empty / shows "no notes classified yet" — why? The own/source ratio needs notes tagged with own or source tags. Out of the box the defaults are sensible (#thought, #book, #article, ...), but if you use different tag names, configure them in settings. The hero panel and metrics grid render regardless.

When are history snapshots taken? Once per local day, debounced by 10 seconds after the last metric update. The very first snapshot appears once your vault metrics settle on first load. A second day is required before the sparkline can render a trend.

How do I set up own/source classification for my own taxonomy?

1. Decide on tag names that represent your own thinking versus external material.
2. Add them to Own tags / Source tags in settings (the leading # is optional).
3. The collector restarts and reclassifies on save — no Obsidian restart needed.

What's a "tangle"? A note that bridges large parts of your graph — high incoming-link count, high outgoing-link count, or both. Useful for finding MOCs (maps of content), index notes, and accidentally over-connected hubs. Detection mode (AND/OR/SUM) and thresholds are configurable.

Does this work on mobile? No. isDesktopOnly is set in the manifest. The metric pipeline (vault scan + memoization) is tuned for desktop and uses APIs not available on iOS.

How do I exclude a specific note or folder from statistics?

• From counts entirely — add the folder to Excluded folders.
• From tangle detection only — use the Tangles exclude list (note path or folder prefix).

My CSV export saves to vault instead of disk. Native save dialog (File System Access API) is preferred when available; the plugin falls back to an in-vault folder picker on environments without it. Use a recent Obsidian + Electron build to get the OS dialog.

Advanced Usage

Showing All Statistics

All statistics can be shown by creating and enabling a CSS snippet with the following content.

/* Show all vault statistics. */
.obsidian-vault-full-statistics--item {
    display: initial !important;
}

Showing Selected Statistics

Similarly, one can show certain statistics. Below is a snippet that hides all but the notes statistic. The snippet can be modified to include more or different statistics.

/* Hide all statistics. */
.obsidian-vault-full-statistics--item {
    display: none !important;
}

/* Always show the notes statistic. */
.obsidian-vault-full-statistics--item-notes {
    display: initial !important;
}

Development

Requires Node.js 18+ and npm.

git clone https://github.com/jtprogru/obsidian-vault-full-statistics-plugin
cd obsidian-vault-full-statistics-plugin
npm install
npm run dev      # watch-mode esbuild — rebuilds main.js on save
npm test         # jest test suite
npm run lint     # eslint
npm run build    # production build (tsc type-check + esbuild)

For iterating against a live vault, symlink the repo into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/vault-full-statistics/ and toggle the plugin off/on in Obsidian after each rebuild.

Source code lives in src/. Notable modules:

• main.ts — plugin entry point, status bar, commands
• statisticsView.ts — side view rendering (hero, sections)
• collect.ts — vault metrics collector and memoized graph derivatives
• tangles.ts / tanglesView.ts — high-degree note detection and report
• historyStore.ts — daily snapshots and CSV export
• settings.ts — settings tab

A Taskfile.yml is included for common operations if you use Task.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for notable changes per release, or the full list at GitHub Releases.

License

MIT