Smart Environment settings

Smart Environment is the shared engine behind Smart Plugins (Smart Connections, Smart Context, Smart Chat). It controls how your vault is indexed, embedded, and processed, and which models are used.

Use these settings to:

• Include or exclude vault content from indexing.
• Rebuild or change embedding, chat, or ranking models.
• Tune indexing granularity and performance.
• Diagnose stale or missing results.

Depending on your setup, these controls appear either inline within plugin settings or as a full Smart Environment page (with Pro options).

Depending on what you have installed, you may see:

• Core: A compact set of controls inside Smart Plugin settings, or
• Pro: A full "Env Pro" settings tab with all Pro options

All Smart Environment data is stored inside a .smart-env/ folder within your vault.

Core vs Pro settings

Core Smart Environment settings are intentionally minimal: the goal is to keep setup simple while still giving you the controls you need to rebuild and troubleshoot.

Where to find these settings in Obsidian

In Obsidian, open Settings then look for the Community plugins section. Smart Environment settings are located in one of two places depending on whether you are a Pro user:

• Core: Smart Connections (or other Smart Plugin)
• Pro: Dedicated Env Pro settings tab

Core settings

Sources

• Notes become sources automatically; you do not need to manage them one by one.
• Additional plugins may create specialized sources (blocks, bases, external files).

Manage excluded folders

"Manage excluded folders" button opens a folder selection UI so you can exclude entire folders from processing.

The "Manage excluded folders" UI looks like:

• A search input to quickly find folders.
• A list of folders you can select.
• Excluded folders appear in a list at the top (click the x to remove).

Excluded folders are not indexed, so they will not appear in Connections/Lookup and will not be used for embeddings.

Common exclusions:

• Archives
• Backups
• Export folders
• Third‑party content
• Anything you don't want to be used by Smart Plugins

After large exclusion changes, you may need to restart Obsidian or Reset data to get a clean state.

View all exclusions

Shows all files excluded from processing. This is useful to confirm whether a file is missing because it is excluded.

Use it to confirm that:

• A folder exclusion is active
• A file exclusion is active
• Something is not being excluded unexpectedly

Some exclusions may be automatic (for example, items that cannot be safely processed because the file path is too long).

Reset data

Resets Smart Environment Sources data. This includes both source and block embeddings. Re-importing will be triggered after the reset.

• Clears existing environment source data and rebuilds it.
• Recreates embeddings using the current embedding model.

Use this when you want the cleanest rebuild of source data, especially after:

1. You changed the embedding model.
2. Re-enabling "Embed blocks"
3. Large vault reorganizations (moves/renames)

• Does not delete:
  • Notes or vault files
  • Smart Environment settings
  • Non-source or block data in Smart Environment (ex. Chat Threads)

Embedding models

This controls the embedding model used for semantic features.

What you will see:

• An embedding model selector.
• A "Current ..." model card (example shown: transformers - TaylorAI/bge-micro-v2).
• Actions like Edit and Test on the current model card.

How to use it:

• If you change the embedding model, you should Re-import sources so existing embeddings are rebuilt for the new model.

Recommendation: start with the default local model. Only switch when you know what kind of improvement you want (multilingual support, code focus, etc.).

Muted notices

If you mute a Smart Environment notification, it will show up here.
See the "Notifications" section below for more details.

Pro settings

Pro adds deeper control over:

• What gets embedded (sources vs blocks)
• Minimum lengths (to avoid embedding tiny/noisy content)
• Excluding individual files
• Model configurations (more providers and model types)

Sources

Sources settings control what gets processed (and what is ignored), plus the actions that rebuild source and embedding data.

This view exposes additional source-processing controls. Items marked PRO require the Pro tier.

Manage excluded folders

Same as the Core setting. See "Manage excluded folders" above for more details.

Manage excluded files (PRO)

Exclude specific files without excluding an entire folder.

Useful when:

• One large file lives in an otherwise useful folder
• You want most of a folder indexed but need to ignore a few specific files

View all exclusions

Same as the Core setting. See "View all exclusions" above for more details.

Re-import wait time (PRO)

"Time in seconds to wait before re-importing a file after modification."

This is the wait-time before re-embedding after making edits:

• Higher = fewer repeated re-imports while editing (less CPU churn)
• Lower = updates appear sooner (more frequent processing)

Manually triggering re-import

As soon as you make a change the Smart Environment status bar element will change to "Embed now" followed by the number of changed files detected. Click "Embed now" to manually trigger the re-import process.

Embed blocks (PRO)

Blocks represent parts/sections of notes. Embedding allows more granular results in semantic lookups. When enabled, large documents are split into fine-grained blocks (based on headings and structure), improving semantic search and context relevance.

• When enabled, the environment can embed content at a finer granularity (blocks/sections), not just whole notes.

What it changes:

• On: Smart Environment embeds smaller chunks (blocks/sections) for finer-grained matches
• Off: embeddings are coarser (more note-level behavior)

Tradeoffs:

• On: better precision inside long notes, more storage/compute

• Off: faster, lighter, less granular

• Why enable it:

  • More precise semantic matches (especially for long notes).
  • Better results for workflows that benefit from paragraph/section-level retrieval.

Minimum length to embed (Sources) (PRO)

"Minimum number of characters a source must have to be embedded."

If a source is shorter than this threshold, it will be skipped for embeddings.

Use cases:

• Increase the threshold to reduce noise from tiny notes/templates
• Decrease the threshold if you rely on very short notes being discoverable

Minimum length to embed (Blocks) (PRO)

"Minimum number of characters a block must have to be embedded."

Same concept as Sources minimum length, but applied to block chunks.

Reset data

Same as the Core setting. See "Reset data" above for more details.

Models

Model settings control which model is used for embeddings (retrieval), chat (generation), and ranking (reranking).

This view breaks models into three groups.

Embedding models

Embedding models generate vectors used for semantic similarity.

• Used as the default embedding model when no other is specified.
  • Set the default from the dropdown.
  • Click + New to add another embedding model config.
  • Use Edit to change the selected model config.
  • Use Test to verify the model is working.
• Current embedding model

Practical guidance:

• Changing embedding model changes what "similar" means for your vault.
• After switching, re-import so all sources and blocks are embedded with the same model.
  • If you switch embedding models, Reset data is required so to re-import sources( and embeddings are regenerated).

Chat models (PRO)

Chat models are used to interact with language models via an API. These API models may be local or on the cloud.

• Local providers run on your machine (needs local setup).
• Cloud providers call a remote API (requires keys + internet).

You can keep multiple chat model configs (local and cloud) and choose a default.

• What you see:
  • Default chat model: used when no other is specified
  • A Current model card showing provider + model

If you see a "missing" message like the screenshot, it means:

• A provider is selected, but no specific model is configured yet.
• Fix by editing the chat model and selecting an actual model.

Provider options shown in the dropdown:

• Open Router (cloud)
• PRO: LM Studio (local, requires LM Studio app)
• PRO: Ollama (local, requires Ollama app)
• PRO: OpenAI (cloud)
• PRO: Google Gemini (cloud)
• PRO: Cohere (cloud)
• PRO: xAI Grok (cloud)
• PRO: Anthropic Claude (cloud)
• PRO: Deepseek (cloud)

Ranking models (PRO)

Ranking (reranking) models can reorder retrieved results for better relevance after initial retrieval.

• These are used when a workflow needs a dedicated ranking/reranking model (for example, to reorder results after retrieval).
• Default ranking model: used when no other is specified downstream
  • "Downstream" means specific Smart Plugins may allow you to set a specific model.
• Controls:
  • New: add another ranking model configuration
  • Edit: change the model/provider configuration
  • Test: verify the model can run
    Ranking models are typically used to improve ordering of candidate results (after retrieval) when supported.

Notifications

Smart Env uses notifications to show what it is doing, especially during embedding-heavy operations like re-importing.

Embedding progress notice

The embedding progress notice includes:

• Smart Env version label
• A progress counter
• Throughput (embedding speed)
• The embedding model being used
• Controls:
  • A mute icon (not recommended if running for the first time)
  • A Pause button (pause the embedding process)

This is the easiest way to confirm that indexing is actively running after a re-import.

Pause embedding process (green)

After clicking pause a new notification with a "Resume" button will appear.

Mute notification (blue)

Most notification are mutable. Notifications can be un-muted from the settings.

Muting a notice

Most Smart Environment notices can be muted directly from the notification itself. Look for the "bell with cross" icon within the notification (highlighted in the above image).

Muted notices

Muted notices lists notices you muted. If none are muted, you will see "No muted notices."

From the Models dialog, you can see whether anything is muted:

• Section: Notifications
• Label: Muted notices
• If empty: "No muted notices."

If you have muted something, you can manage it here:

Muted notices in the settings (pink)

Muted notices will appear in the settings. Click Unmute to allow the notification to show in the future.

Common problems

"I changed models but results did not change"

• If you changed the embedding model, you likely need to run Reset data so embeddings are rebuilt.

"Some notes never show up"

• Check View all exclusions to confirm the note (or its folder) is not excluded.

"It keeps reprocessing while I edit" (PRO)

• Increase Re-import wait time.

"Matches feel too broad" (Pro)

• Enable Embed blocks, decrease minimum embedding length, and reset data.

"Everything feels slow"

• Exclude heavy folders/files and re-import
• Pro options
  • Disable Embed blocks
  • Increase Minimum length to embed thresholds

Related settings pages

Smart Environment settings are shared across plugins, but each plugin has its own settings too:

• Connections - settings page
• Context - settings page
• Chat - settings page