Plumb

An Obsidian vault template — MOCs, templates, and Bases dashboards for organizing a personal knowledge base around links instead of folders, without a plugin quietly becoming the only way to read your own notes back. There is no AI here, if you need to set it yourself.

The one idea

Every note here points to a parent through an up property instead of living in a "correct" folder. Folders are just where a file happens to sit; up is where it actually belongs. Scatter your notes across a mess of directories that make no sense together, rename every folder, delete the tree and start over — the dashboards still find everything, because they filter on up, never on path.

I called this vault Plumb, after the oldest measuring tool there is: a weight on a string. Hang it next to any wall — ancient, cracked, rebuilt crooked three times — and it still finds true vertical, because the string was never attached to the wall in the first place. up is the string.

Where this comes from

Two of these ideas aren't mine, and I'd rather say so up front than let you assume they are:

• Links, not folders. Steph Ango (@kepano, Obsidian's CEO) doesn't use folders in his own vault — he navigates by backlinks and a categories property. up is my version of that same move.
• File over App. Also Steph Ango: "the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them." Everything here is plain markdown and YAML specifically so it outlives whatever's reading it today.

What I actually built on top of those two:

• Dashboards don't get planned, they get earned. A MOC (Tea.md, Movies.md, ...) doesn't exist until roughly ten notes already point up at that topic — before that, it's just a value with no file behind it yet, a ghost. templates/bases/Places.base is one right now: fully working, waiting for a "Places" dashboard that doesn't exist.
• Minimum Plugins. Around ten, chosen on purpose, not accumulated. Before installing an eleventh, I ask: is this decoration on top of plain markdown, or is it quietly becoming the only way to read this note back? Excalidraw ships anyway — a drawing saved as compressed JSON isn't hand-readable without it, and for me that's still worth the trade. Kanban Template.md is in templates/ too, but the Kanban plugin isn't bundled here; install it yourself if you want the board to actually render instead of plain headings.
• Unfiled isn't lost. A note with no up yet gets tagged need-up, not forced into a home it doesn't have. "I don't know yet" and "I lost it" are different problems, and they shouldn't look the same.

Installing it

1. Clone this repository, or use GitHub's Code → Download ZIP feature and unzip it somewhere convenient.
2. In Obsidian: Open folder as vault → pick that folder.
3. Obsidian will ask to trust community plugins the first time — accept it; that's what turns on Dynamic Views and the rest of what's already configured. (Bases itself is core Obsidian, not a plugin — it works regardless.)

Getting started

Read READ_THIS_B4_START.md next — a short, practical checklist for your first few minutes in the vault, not more philosophy.

Licensed MIT — take whatever's useful, no need to ask.

By waldemar-one