How to Set a Default Vault to Open on Startup in Obsidian   

If you use more than one vault in Obsidian, you already know the pain. You close the app in your work vault, open it the next morning, and... it opens your personal vault instead. Or your study vault. Or whichever one you happened to touch last.

Obsidian doesn't have a built-in "default vault" setting. It just opens whatever you used last. That's fine if you only have one vault, but it gets annoying fast when you're juggling several.

The good news is that there are a few ways around this. Some are dead simple, some take a bit more effort. Let's go through them.

First, a heads-up about the Vault Selector plugin

If you've been searching for the Vault Selector plugin in Obsidian's Community Plugins browser and can't find it - you're not doing anything wrong. It's just not there.

The plugin exists, but it hasn't been accepted into (or submitted to) the official plugin directory. So the only way to get it is to install it manually from GitHub. It sounds more intimidating than it actually is.

How to install it manually

Step 1 - Download the files

Head over to the GitHub repo: https://github.com/tholms/VaultSelector

Go to the Releases section and grab these two files:

• main.js
• manifest.json

Step 2 - Drop them in the right folder

Inside your vault, find (or create) this path:

YourVault/.obsidian/plugins/vault-selector/

Put both files directly inside that vault-selector folder. Just make sure the folder name is exactly vault-selector - all lowercase, with a hyphen.

Step 3 - Turn it on

Restart Obsidian, then go to Settings → Community Plugins → Installed Plugins. You should see Vault Selector in the list. Flip the toggle on, and you're done.

What it actually does

No setup needed. It just works in the background.

Here's the trick: every time you close Obsidian, the plugin quietly removes the "open": true flag from your obsidian.json config file. That flag is what tells Obsidian which vault you used last. Without it, Obsidian has no idea which one to open - so it shows you the vault picker instead.

Simple, clever, and effective.

The easy way out: a desktop shortcut

If manually installing a plugin sounds like too much hassle, there's a much simpler trick. You can just make a shortcut that opens a specific vault directly.

Here's how:

1. Right-click your desktop → New → Shortcut
2. In the location field, paste this:

obsidian://open?vault=YourVaultName

3. Give it a name (something like "Open Work Vault") → click Finish

That's it. Double-click the shortcut, and Obsidian opens that exact vault - no guessing, no "last used" nonsense.

⚠️ One thing to watch out for: if your vault name has spaces, replace them with %20. So My Vault becomes My%20Vault.

The only catch is that this only works when you launch Obsidian through that shortcut. If you open it from the Start menu or taskbar, you're back to the old last-used behavior.

The no-tools workaround (for when you rarely switch vaults)

If you only switch vaults once in a blue moon, you don't need any plugins or shortcuts. There's a simple manual trick that does the job.

Here's what to do:

1. Before closing the vault you've been working on, open the vault switcher first.

2. Close the vault (but leave the switcher open).

3. Then close the vault switcher itself.

Next time you launch Obsidian, you'll be greeted with the vault picker instead of whatever you had open last.

It's not elegant, and it's not perfect — but if you only need this once in a while, it saves you from installing anything.

Another plugin: Auto Workspace Loader

This one is still not available for installation from the community plugins: Auto Workspace Loader

It lets you set a different startup workspace for desktop and mobile. So if you like having your research layout on one device and your writing layout on another, this handles that nicely. It's especially handy if you keep separate workspaces for different kinds of work.

Manual Installation

Until this plugin is available in the community store, you can install it manually.

1. Go to the Releases page of this repository.
2. Download the main.js, styles.css, and manifest.json files from the latest release.
3. In your Obsidian vault, navigate to the .obsidian/plugins/ folder.
4. Create a new folder inside plugins named auto-workspace-loader.
5. Copy the three downloaded files into this new folder.
6. Completely restart Obsidian.
7. Go to Settings > Community Plugins, find "Auto Workspace Loader," and enable it.

For the tinkerers: editing the config file directly

If you like getting your hands dirty, you can edit Obsidian's config file yourself.

The file is called obsidian.json, and it lives here depending on your OS:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\obsidian\obsidian.json
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian/obsidian.json
• Linux: ~/.config/obsidian/obsidian.json

Inside, whichever vault has "open": true is the one that launches. Change that flag to a different vault, and you've changed your default.

But there's a catch - Obsidian has to be completely closed when you edit this. If it's running, it'll just overwrite your changes the moment you quit. So close it first, edit, then reopen.

The community has also built a few scripts around this. On Windows, there's a VBS script called obsidian-pure-launcher.vbs that clears the "open": true flag before launching, forcing the vault picker to show up every time. On Linux, a little shell script using jq does the same thing.

One thing to know about Obsidian 1.11

Obsidian 1.11 added a setting under Files & Links → Default file to open. It lets you pick what file opens when you start the app.

But here's the thing - this controls which note opens inside a vault, not which vault opens. So it's useful, but it doesn't solve the multi-vault problem. Don't confuse the two.

Wrapping up

The bottom line: Obsidian still doesn't have a proper "default vault" setting, and people have been asking for one for years. Until that changes, these workarounds are your best bet. Pick whichever one fits how you work, and you'll finally get a startup experience that doesn't feel like a coin flip.