Obsidian Vaults In Finder

Read a note with its links and callouts intact, without opening Obsidian

An Obsidian vault is a folder of Markdown files, so Finder can show it, but Quick Look shows each note as plain text, with [[wikilinks]] and callout markers left raw. spacebar renders them.

What Renders

• [[Note]], [[Note|alias]], [[folder/Note]] and [[Note#Heading]] open that note in the panel. A link that matches nothing is greyed out.
• ![[image.png]] shows the image, and ![[image.png|300]] sets its width. ![[Note]] shows the note inline, read only, one level deep.
• > [!note] Title callouts are drawn as boxes: note, tip, warning, danger, example, quote and the rest.
• #tags show as pills.

The Whole Vault In The Sidebar

Press Space on a note inside a vault and the sidebar shows the whole vault, so its links reach every note. A name is looked for anywhere under that folder. .obsidian stays hidden, like every hidden file, unless you turn hidden files on.

Links resolve only to files inside the vault; paths that lead out of it resolve to nothing.

Preview The Vault Folder

Turn on Preview folders in spacebar’s Sidebar settings, then press Space on the vault folder itself. It opens on the README, else the first Markdown file, else the note a quick look through its subfolders finds (the one nearest the top, then one named like index or Home), else an overview of what the folder holds.

Edit Without Switching Apps

Click a paragraph to edit it, or tick a task, and it saves to the note. The preview redraws when Obsidian or anything else changes the file.

spacebar is a reader for Finder, not a replacement for Obsidian: plugins and Obsidian’s own views stay in Obsidian.

Install

Free and open source for macOS 13 or later. Try vault-demo in the demo on the home page first.