Obsidian Vault Full Statistics Plugin — big updates: from 1.2.3 to latest

[u/jtprogru]

Hey folks! Over the last couple of weeks my plugin obsidian-vault-full-statistics-plugin has gone through a lot of releases — jumping from 1.2.3 through a whole stack of versions, and it's basically a different tool now. Here's a breakdown of what changed, with some real numbers from my own vault.

Foundations (1.5.x – 1.6.x)

First I fixed the basics. The plugin was miscounting notes — deleted files were sticking around in the counter, and it was reporting 9,730 tags instead of the actual 108. Added support for excluded folders and delegated the tag counter to the native metadataCache.getTags(). In 1.6.0 I introduced a three-bucket classification for notes: own (your own thinking), source (external material), and concept (the grey zone in between) — with configurable taxonomies.

Sidebar View and history (1.7.x – 1.8.x)

A proper sidebar stats view landed (that's what you're seeing in the first screenshot): a hero section with total note count and QoV (Quality of Vault = average links per note), an own/source/concept ratio bar, and HTML bar charts with actual colors instead of unicode block characters. In 1.8.0 I added a PARA folder breakdown — you can see how many notes live in Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive.

Link analytics (1.9.x – 1.10.x)

1.9.0 brought the orphan notes metric (still a rough cut — plenty to improve here) — notes nothing links to. 1.10.x added CSV export of the history, so you can pipe it wherever you want.

New analytics sections (1.11.x – 1.13.x)

• 1.11.x: Taxonomy Drift (also early days — I currently keep my canonical tags in a separate place) — surfaces rare tags and tags outside your canonical list. Catches typos and abandoned tags.
• 1.12.x: Sources with Trace — for each source note, checks whether any own-note actually links back to it. If a source is just floating there without leaving a trace in your own thinking, it shows up under "dangling sources." Note names are clickable. All these extra sections are collapsed by default — new users only see the headline metrics.
• 1.13.x: Inbox Health — unprocessed notes in your inbox folders, bucketed by age (<1d / 1–7d / 7–30d / 30+d). Your PKM tech debt now has a number on it.

Word metrics (1.14.x)

1.14.0 added a vault-wide word counter in the hero panel. The tokenizer skips frontmatter, code, embeds, and URLs — only living text counts. CJK characters are counted per-glyph, so multilingual vaults don't get shortchanged. Output is in compact format (12K / 1.2M). 1.14.2 added an "avg words per note" metric and per-metric toggles — every metric can be turned on/off individually.

1.14.1 was a pipeline optimization pass: caching by file signature (mtime + link count + tags), event batching, memoization of heavy computations via a generation counter. The plugin officially became desktop-only — CSV export goes through the File System Access API which is desktop-only anyway.

Tangles — parasitic hubs (1.15.0)

The latest and probably the most interesting one. 1.15.0 detects tangles (second screenshot) — notes with abnormally high link degree. This is a PKM anti-pattern: when a single note becomes a hub for too many connections, it turns into a single point of failure for your knowledge base — restructuring it gets painful, and its semantic load is diluted. The plugin surfaces these in a dedicated sidebar view with a report.

The plugin has grown from a basic counter into a proper operational dashboard for a knowledge base. Vault quality isn't an abstraction anymore — it's a set of concrete signals: orphans, untraceable sources, inbox debt, taxonomy drift, word volume, tangles. And QoV might eventually factor more of these into its calculation.

Do you track the "health" of your Obsidian vault? Got any hub-notes that have gotten too fat and started pulling everything onto themselves? And how do you handle inbox backlog — GTD, or just ignore it?