The Obsidian Feature You Didn’t Know You NEEDED

Obsidian’s new Bookmarks feature turns “start notes” into a flexible workspace layer—letting users save not just notes, but graph filters, searches, canvases, headings, and even attachments as quick-jump items. The payoff is practical: a dedicated bookmarks pane becomes a distraction-free control panel for whatever work is active, while the underlying files keep their original names and remain fully accessible in the vault.

At its core, Bookmarks replaces the older Start Notes core plugin. Instead of a note automatically living in its own Start Notes view, Bookmarks creates bookmark entities that can be titled independently of the original file. That small detail matters when context changes: a note titled “April monthly newsletter” can be bookmarked under a project-specific label like “Next newsletter,” without renaming the real file on disk. Bookmarks also behave like temporary focus tools. They can be reordered by drag-and-drop, revealed in file navigation, and removed without deleting the underlying content—so users can “laser focus” on the current task and discard the bookmark later.

Beyond basic note pinning, Bookmarks adds structure through bookmark groups, including nested folder-like organization. Users can create groups such as “April To Do’s” and assign bookmarks into those groups, effectively building a folder hierarchy inside the bookmarks pane. This becomes especially useful for graph view workflows. Previously, graph filters had to be rebuilt every time; now graph view configurations can be saved as bookmarks with their own titles, groups, and color-coded queries. A saved graph filter can exclude entire folders (like journaling), hide specific paths (like books), omit tags (such as “mocks”), and limit results to existing files—then be recalled instantly.

The same saving logic extends to other navigation surfaces. Searches can be bookmarked so a complex query returns with one click. Canvases can be saved as bookmarks, letting users jump back to a specific visual workspace (for example, a canvas tied to a YouTube video). Even headings inside notes can be bookmarked, so navigation lands on the exact section rather than the top of the document. The feature is broad enough to include attachments like images or PDFs, and it can also “bookmark all tabs” (active notes) via the command palette.

In personal use cases, the feature becomes a project manager. Permanent graph view bookmarks live in a dedicated “graph views” group, while active work sits in project-specific folders—such as a studio renovation project, each YouTube video’s script and canvas, and an ongoing effort to use AI across a vault without sending data to OpenAI. When projects finish, bookmarks are deleted while the final outputs remain, keeping the left-side UI focused on what’s currently worth attention. The result is a workflow where the bookmarks pane stays open, enabling quick switching between projects and frequent revisiting of goals—without relying on a massive file list.