Surfacing Hidden Folders in Obsidian and Building an AI Base on Top

Canonical version: Surfacing Hidden Folders in Obsidian and Building an AI Base on Top.

I built a new Obsidian plugin this morning; one adding a feature I've been missing for a long while now.

AI tools tend to store many files (including a ton of Markdown ones!) in hidden folders such as .claude. Unfortunately Obsidian completely ignores those; they're not visible in the file tree, not indexed, impossible to search for or query. This might change in the future, but I needed a solution now. So I built it myself (with the help of AI :p).

Hidden Folders Access

The Hidden Folders Access plugin for Obsidian does one thing very well: it makes hidden root-level dot-folders (like .claude, .github, ...) fully visible to Obsidian without renaming them on disk.

I really missed this capability. Not just showing hidden folders in the file explorer; I wanted their contents to be properly indexed and available in search, in Dataview queries, in Obsidian Bases, and everywhere else.

The main reason I built it: making my .claude/ folder (skills, agents, commands, hooks, memory, ...) a first-class citizen of the vault. Searchable, linkable, and queryable like any other note; without having to jump through hoops.

An AI Base for Agents, Skills, and Commands

With hidden folders now properly exposed, I'm building an Obsidian Base with dedicated views to help me manage my AI Agents, my AI Agent Skills, my AI commands, etc.

Bases are one of my favorite features of Obsidian. The combination of "everything is plain markdown" plus "queryable views over frontmatter" is incredibly powerful, and I'm leveraging those for tons of things.

A Custom Base View for Dependency Visualization

On top of that AI Base, I intend to build another plugin that will provide a custom Obsidian Base view type (similar to what I've already done with the Life Tracker plugin for Obsidian, the Journal Bases plugin for Obsidian, or the Graph Explorer Base View plugin for Obsidian. That custom view type will let me visualize the relationships and dependencies between AI Agents and Skills.

My goal is simple: visually see and track where the "issues" and opportunities are in my AI agents and AI skills graphs. As an added benefit, it will also help me visualize the dependencies between agents, skills, and notes across the whole system.

Coming in OSK v4

All of this will land in the upcoming v4 release of the Obsidian Starter Kit, along with many other cool things I've been cooking up.

If you want to get notified when v4 ships (and get all the goodies that come with it), now is a great time to grab the Obsidian Starter Kit; you'll get every future update for free, and you'll secure the best possible price before I increase it after v4 has landed.

Also consider joining the Knowii Community, where we dive DEEP into the killer combo that is AI, Knowledge Management and Obsidian.

Related

• Hidden Folders Access plugin for Obsidian
• Obsidian Bases
• AI Agents
• AI Agent Skills
• Obsidian Starter Kit
• Claude Code

About Sébastien

I'm Sébastien Dubois, and I'm on a mission to help knowledge workers escape information overload. After 20+ years in IT and seeing too many brilliant minds drowning in digital chaos, I've decided to help people build systems that actually work. Through the Knowii Community, my courses, products & services and my Website/Newsletter, I share practical and battle-tested systems.

I write about Knowledge Work, Personal Knowledge Management, Note-taking, Lifelong Learning, Personal Organization, Productivity, and more. I also craft lovely digital products and tools.

If you want to follow my work, then become a member and join our community.

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