Plainva
← All posts

Plainva 0.2.3: a tidier sidebar and two reports fixed

July 13, 2026

After the big 0.2.0 hardening pass, this one is deliberately quieter — a handful of sidebar conveniences and two fixes that came straight from your reports. Small releases like this are my favorite kind: nothing dramatic, just fewer papercuts.

Your recent notes, and your databases, one click away

The left sidebar picked up two things. There’s now a Recently opened strip above the file tree, so the notes you were just in are right there — no hunting through folders to get back to where you were.

And there’s a new Databases tab, next to Files, Tags and Bookmarks. It lists every .base in your vault, grouped by folder; click one to open it. If you lean on .base databases the way I do, having them collected in one place — instead of scattered across the tree — turns out to be a small daily relief. (This mirrors what the mobile app already does, which is where the idea came from.)

Two reports, both fixed

Two GitHub issues from the same sharp-eyed user shaped the rest of the release.

The first was about index.md: generated links to sub-folders were pointing at the folder path rather than the folder’s own index.md, which made Obsidian create an empty note on click. Now those links point at the sub-folder’s index.md, so they open the right thing in both apps. While I was in there, index.md now sorts to the top of its folder — below the sub-folders, above the other files — instead of alphabetically in the middle, and renaming a file reindexes only what changed rather than the whole vault, so the sidebar keeps up instead of lagging.

The second was subtler, and I liked it a lot. In the live preview, a Markdown link that followed a footnote on the same line — post[^1] from [The Markdown Handbook](…) — would swallow the footnote and the words between them into the link, underlining the lot. The parser was too greedy: a real Markdown link’s text can’t contain a ], and it wasn’t enforcing that. One tightened rule (and a regression test) later, the link stops where it should. As the reporter noted, the file itself was always fine — it was only the on-screen styling.

And a few small things

The “update available” notice is clickable now: it carries an Install now & Restart button, so a new version is one click away instead of a trip into Settings. The calendar’s day cells lost a stray grey background they’d picked up in dark mode. And the vault gets a small icon next to its name above the file tree.

If you’re on 0.2.x, the built-in updater will offer 0.2.3; otherwise it’s on the releases page. Plain files, no format changes — your vaults just work.

— Marco