💡 New Tab dashboard layout

Status: finished (2026-04-19) — questions+log 2-column grid shipped on New Tab. Git-history view dropped: too much overhead and doesn’t work on mobile.

==tl;dr: Upgrade 🏠 New Tab so the AI agent’s state is legible at a glance — questions.md and log.md side-by-side, with a git-history view below.==

Why?

The vault is an AI-maintained wiki. The New Tab page is the first thing seen on Obsidian launch — it should surface the agent’s current state (what it’s been asked, what it’s done, what it changed) as a single dashboard.

Right now New Tab embeds the notifications feed and the last few log entries vertically. That’s a start, but:

• questions.md isn’t surfaced at all — the human can’t see what the agent couldn’t answer from the vault.
• No visual sense of recent git activity — which files changed, how often, and where.
• Vertical stacking wastes horizontal space on wide monitors.

What?

• Two-column top row — AI - Questions on the left, AI - Log on the right. Both rendered via dataviewjs (tail of the respective file).
• Below: git history view — either a mini graph (commits over time) or a “files touched this week” heatmap. Ideally clickable.
• Keep existing quicklinks and notifications callout above or beside the main grid.

How?

• Questions + log columns: copy the existing New Tab.md dataviewjs pattern, split into a 2-col Obsidian callout / HTML grid.
• Git view: options —
  • Dataviewjs reading recent commits from .git/logs/HEAD (requires node fs access, may not be available in Obsidian JS sandbox).
  • Obsidian Git plugin’s activity pane (if it exposes an embeddable view).
  • A simple “recently modified” dataview over the vault (cheaper proxy for git activity, doesn’t require git log parsing).
• Start with the two-column questions+log layout — that’s a 20-min change. Git graph is a separate, bigger step.

Outcome

Single dataviewjs block on New Tab renders a responsive grid (grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(280px, 1fr))) — 2 columns on desktop, stacks to 1 column on mobile/narrow panes. Each column tails the last 5 entries of its source file via MarkdownRenderer.renderMarkdown, headed by a wikilink to the source. The old vertical log callout and the “Planned upgrade” tip were removed. Git-history view skipped (overhead + mobile incompatibility).

Related

• 🏠 New Tab — the page being upgraded.
• AGENTS.md — defines 7_Agent/questions.md and 7_Agent/log.md semantics.
• OpenClaw for PKM — broader “AI-native PKM” frame this fits into.