I live in my vault. All day I'm in there — adding knowledge, rewriting notes, pruning dead ones, moving things around. With that much churn I needed one boring, simple thing: show me what I've actually touched lately. Not what I opened. What changed, in any way.
You'd think that's a solved problem. It wasn't — at least not for how I work.
The recent-files plugin didn't fit me
There's a recent-files plugin in the community store, and it's fine for what it does — but it tracks the files you've opened, in a plain list. That's not the question I was asking. I wanted to see what was created, edited, or modified across the whole vault, sortable and filterable, so I could glance at it and know exactly where my week went. I wanted a real table, not a list. Columns I could sort. Filters by folder and type and date. Flags for what's new and what changed since I last looked.
So I started building that. And then I hit the real problem.
The timestamps were lying
My vault is backed by git and it syncs across machines. The moment you do that, the “modified” date you see in any file manager — Obsidian included — stops meaning what you think it means.
Here's why: when git checks out, pulls, merges, or a sync runs, it rewrites the files on disk. The operating system stamps each rewritten file with the moment of that operation — not the moment you actually changed the content. So you open your vault in the morning and everything says it was “modified 11 hours ago,” including notes you haven't opened in weeks. The timestamp is technically real. It's just not your edit. It's last night's sync.
Sorting by “recently modified” was useless — everything was modified at once, by a machine, not by me.
If you've ever searched “why does Obsidian show files as modified when I didn't edit them” — that's this. It's not a bug in Obsidian; it's the filesystem clock getting clobbered by sync.
So I fixed the clock
The honest answer to “when did this note last change” isn't on the filesystem — it's in git history. The commit time survives checkouts, pulls and syncs, because it records when the content changed, not when the file was last written to disk.
So Recent Files Pro lets you pick where the modified time comes from. The default, Smart, uses the most trustworthy signal it has: an edit you made in this session if there is one, otherwise the git commit time, otherwise the filesystem stamp. You can also force pure git, pure in-session edits, or the classic filesystem behaviour if your vault isn't under git. It drives everything — the sort, the UPDATED flag, the date filters, the column — so for the first time, “recently modified” actually means recently modified by you.
Why I'm sharing it
I didn't build this to ship a product. I built the thing I wanted and needed, for my own vault, because nothing else did it. But the timestamp problem isn't unique to me — anyone running Obsidian with git or sync hits it — so it seemed worth handing to other people who've been quietly annoyed by the same thing.
It's free, it has no tracking, and the source is open. If it scratches the same itch for you, take it.