Vault View

Your Obsidian-compatible vault, directly inside Hermes Desktop.

Vault View displaying a linked Markdown note, explorer, outline, and graph inside Hermes Desktop

Vault View brings your Markdown knowledge base into the conversation. Find a note, ask Hermes to create or update it, follow its links, and keep several notes open in a workspace designed for a vault—not a generic file preview.

What is new in 0.5.0

Keep an optional workspace for each conversation, including its open and closed tabs, active note, navigation, editing state, previews and unsaved drafts. Pin several tabs globally when they should remain visible across conversations.
Quote an explicit note selection into the active Hermes conversation from reading, visual editing or Markdown source. The user action inserts a Markdown block quote and never persists the selection.
Create or open a note directly from a localized empty-workspace card, and keep the global Vault View toggle available even when no note is open.
Wrap the main and formatting toolbars at narrow container widths and align controls, menus, dialogs, focus states and empty cards with Hermes theme variables.
Migrate legacy tab state into versioned workspace storage without changing notes or attachments.

Previous catalog review corrections in 0.4.8 and 0.4.7

Keep the plugin inside its own UI root, use public workspace APIs and preserve the direct-install entry point.
SDK-sandboxed web previews, with Hermes >=0.21.5 required.
Separate agent navigation guidance and remote-image settings, both off by default.
Complete English/French errors, dialogs, bridge messages and formatting defaults.
Reliable chunked reading and verified saves for long notes.
Faster navigation with bounded, revision-aware caches and progressive reading.
Live Markdown styling, source preservation, tag search and responsive sidebars.
Lazy image previews, a detail viewer, and image/text/code attachment previews.
Shared note tabs, editing undo/redo and private incident diagnostics.

Raster thumbnails use ffmpeg when available; original images remain available as a fallback. The filesystem transport requires Unix/WSL shell utilities. Direct Obsidian opening is temporarily hidden; external application opening depends on the host/backend configuration. Native Windows/macOS launch validation remains incomplete.

See CHANGELOG.md for the complete changes and AGENTS.md for the public AI contribution guide.

Find. Create. Navigate.

Search the vault	Create and edit	Explore connections
Search notes, browse folders, filter tags, and inspect links.	Write directly or ask Hermes to work through its configured Obsidian CLI.	Follow wikilinks, use Back and Forward, open tabs, or jump through the graph.

Vault View settings showing vault detection, language selection, and privacy controls

Features

Visual reading and Markdown editing
Note and folder creation, renaming, moving, and deletion
Search, explorer, outline, tags, backlinks, outgoing links, and vault graph
Wikilinks, Obsidian callouts, and local images
Multiple tabs with independent navigation history
Explicitly quote a selected note passage into the active conversation
Optional per-conversation workspaces (off by default), with multiple globally pinned tabs
Responsive toolbars that wrap to the actual Vault View container width
Automatic refresh after changes made by Hermes, Obsidian CLI, or another editor
Light and dark Hermes theme support
English, French, or automatic Hermes Desktop language selection
Icon-first controls with localized labels and tooltips

How it works with Hermes

The Hermes agent keeps using its existing Obsidian CLI integration for note operations. Vault View provides the user-facing display and replaces the generic preview for Obsidian-related work. It can show one note, open several notes at once, or stay hidden for background-only operations.

The root plugin.js remains the standalone entry point. plugin.yaml contains catalog metadata only; desktop/plugin.js is an identical Desktop entry point for catalog installation. There is no Python component, Agent tool, or runtime dependency added.

Installation

Vault View is a standalone Hermes Desktop Plugin. It requires no build step, npm package, or Python component.

One-click installation

Open this page on the computer running Hermes Desktop, then select Install in Hermes Desktop:

Install Vault View in Hermes Desktop

Hermes asks for confirmation before installing. If the link is not available in your Hermes Desktop version, use the manual installation below.

Manual installation

Copy this repository into the active Hermes Desktop plugin directory as vault-view.
Confirm that the entry point is $HERMES_HOME/desktop-plugins/vault-view/plugin.js.
Reload Desktop Plugins in Hermes Settings.
Enable Vault View.

Use the plugin directory shown by Hermes Desktop. The Desktop application and its backend may use different locations, especially with WSL or a virtual machine.

Configuration

Vault View automatically looks for the vault already configured through Hermes WIKI_PATH. If no valid .obsidian vault is found, select its root in the settings panel.

The language setting offers Follow Hermes Desktop, English, and Français. The same panel controls tab restoration, optional per-conversation workspaces, panel layout, optional active-note metadata sharing, agent navigation guidance and remote images. Per-conversation workspaces are off by default; when enabled, each conversation retains its own open/closed tabs and drafts, while pinned tabs remain visible everywhere. All sharing/network options are independent and disabled by default.

Selecting text inside a note enables the quote action in the top toolbar and adds Copy selection and Quote selection in the conversation to the note context menu. Quoting is always an explicit user action, targets the currently active Hermes conversation, and does not store the selection.

Privacy

Vault files stay on the configured local filesystem.
No token, credential, personal path, or vault content is embedded in the plugin.
Full note content is never attached to the agent automatically.
Optional active-note sharing is disabled by default and sends only lightweight metadata.
Remote images remain blocked unless explicitly enabled; enabling them sends requests to their providers without a referrer. Explicitly opening a web link contacts its website through the SDK sandbox or external browser.
Navigation guidance is an independent opt-in and is localized.
The vault path remains in Vault View's private local plugin storage.

The screenshots use a synthetic demonstration vault. They contain no personal path, private conversation, or real note content, and their PNG metadata has been removed.

Compatibility

Hermes Desktop >=0.21.5 with Desktop Plugin support
A local Markdown vault compatible with Obsidian
Linux or macOS Unix transport. Windows Desktop can use a WSL-hosted Unix backend; native Windows gateways are not supported by the POSIX file transport.

Support and contributions

Use GitHub Issues for support, bugs, and feature requests. See CONTRIBUTING.md, SUPPORT.md, and SECURITY.md before sharing logs or screenshots.

Independent project

Vault View is an independent community project by ergoCogn sàrl. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Dynalist Inc., the maker of Obsidian, or by Nous Research, the maintainer of Hermes. Product names are used only to describe compatibility.

vault-view

Screenshots

README