Obsidian's 10,000 note surprise

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Once you hit 10,000 notes—and any alias or link to a non-existent note counts towards this limit—Obsidian's fuzzy search becomes Very Bad.

There's a feature request on the Obsidian forum with more details, but the really nice fuzzy search mechanism where you can type something like [[objc and have it match "Objective-C" just no longer works.

Obsidian developers say the limit is there for performance reasons, but I've paid lots of yen for my computer and so I intend to play my note-taking apps with maximum settings.

Here's a cursed little plugin that works around the problem as of Obsidian 1.8.10 using the ✨Monte Carlo method✨:

Download (1.1.0)

Unzip that to your vault's plugin folder (there should be a button to open it in the Community plugins section of the settings), then reload your plugins and enable it.

I've only encountered this problem when inserting links, so not sure if this helps with the quick switcher—please let me know if it doesn't. UPDATE 2025-06-07: There's now a fix for the quick switcher too, using the same mechanism.

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I had to do a bit of digging and reverse engineering to figure this one out. Obsidian's all webpacked and stuff so sadly I couldn't easily patch the check itself from a plugin, so instead I patched the function that collects files to only return up to 9,999 items, sampled randomly, with the sample reshuffled once a second or so (check the code out, it's very silly). If you are just a little over the limit, this works pretty well in practice as the list gets reshuffled while you type.

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Now your fuzzy searches can be even fuzzier.

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