You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
Semantic indexing currently supports a negative carve-out through OBSIDIAN_EMBED_EXCLUDE. This is convenient when most of a vault belongs in semantic retrieval.
Some vaults instead have a deliberately bounded knowledge corpus. For example:
Knowledge/
Sources/
while the rest of the vault contains working files, archives, scratch material, or other content that should never enter semantic retrieval.
This is the case e.g. if you want to have a "First Brain" which is used e.g. as a normal obsidian notebook as usual and you have another "Second Brain" which is fed by the first brain but both live in your Vault.
Maintaining exclusions for every non-retrieval folder is fragile because newly created folders become eligible automatically.
Proposed solution
Add an optional positive include-prefix configuration, for example:
OBSIDIAN_EMBED_INCLUDE=Knowledge/,Sources/
Behavior:
absent/empty → current behavior unchanged;
present → only matching vault-relative prefixes are eligible;
hardcoded safety exclusions still apply;
OBSIDIAN_EMBED_EXCLUDE has precedence and can carve out subtrees;
index coverage uses exactly the same eligibility function;
cached entries that fall outside the current scope are removed on rebuild.
reacted with thumbs up emoji reacted with thumbs down emoji reacted with laugh emoji reacted with hooray emoji reacted with confused emoji reacted with heart emoji reacted with rocket emoji reacted with eyes emoji
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
What problem would this solve?
Semantic indexing currently supports a negative carve-out through
OBSIDIAN_EMBED_EXCLUDE. This is convenient when most of a vault belongs in semantic retrieval.Some vaults instead have a deliberately bounded knowledge corpus. For example:
while the rest of the vault contains working files, archives, scratch material, or other content that should never enter semantic retrieval.
This is the case e.g. if you want to have a "First Brain" which is used e.g. as a normal obsidian notebook as usual and you have another "Second Brain" which is fed by the first brain but both live in your Vault.
Maintaining exclusions for every non-retrieval folder is fragile because newly created folders become eligible automatically.
Proposed solution
Add an optional positive include-prefix configuration, for example:
Behavior:
OBSIDIAN_EMBED_EXCLUDEhas precedence and can carve out subtrees;Suggested shared semantics:
Backward compatibility
With no include prefixes configured, semantic indexing behaves exactly as it does today.
Acceptance criteria
Non-goals
No changes to embeddings, chunking, ranking or retrieval fusion.
All reactions