✅ Sub-folders (nested folders) to organize vault

Just hold on a bit, @lbodnyk-iss-na-com. Kyle and his team always do the best they can, but we can’t expect express updates so soon. (Unlikely Telegram staff, that is HUGE team. Bitwarden’s just a small team hatching the eggshell yet.)

Bitwarden’s pretty new in the market and we should give it some time until it comes up with the best features a password management platform could offer.

It’s just a matter of time until it comes out. I’m still on LP, but I’m contributing with the community looking forward to migrate to BW asap.

This is something that’s keeping my company from using Bitwarden. With the number of passwords that need to be managed, we’d need to be able to organize passwords by city > state > purpose, or even city > state > role. Tagging would be helpful, but we definitely need to be able to keep things organized by geographic and role boundaries.

The UI doesn’t need to be reinvented:

  • Let me name the folder with slashes.
    • No need to create a tree UI for editing–just show the full paths in the dropdown.
    • Let me determine how messy is too messy and let me deal with it.
    • Update the UI as a tree menu later if desired. I would like to have folders now.
  • Pane UI for displaying folders can just scroll horizontally.
    • Let me determine how deep is too deep.
    • Let me resize pane. I have a gigantic screen.
    • Alternately, could display the folders as a typical mobile menu that only displays one level with an up/back link.
      • This is obviously how you’d want it to work on mobile.
  • There is no need to represent the data as a tree when searching. I want to look through results linearly, anyways.
    • It would be nice to see the full folder name in the results, however.

From what I’ve read on this topic, I feel like there’s a misunderstanding of the value of “folders” compared to tags. Folders (categories) are for structured organization of information. Tags are a broad form of classification that actually can benefit greatly from being filtered primarily by a category–especially with large amounts of data. Please don’t throw out the concept of folders.

4 Likes

@tommy why not using city, state, purpose, role as tags?

@Ulrich_Neumann To my knowledge, those fields are only available for Identities, not login credentials. Those fields aren’t searchable in Identities, either.

To answer your question with the assumption that tagging was available and searchable:

Tags are a valuable way to filter information. However, Folder/Tree/Category organization serves as a powerful primary filter when it comes to large amounts of information. They also allow you to inherently provide a context or namespace for similarly named items.

Folder/Tree/Category layout is an almost universally understood visual representation of structure or hierarchy in software. It practically requires zero training for someone familiar with any kind of organizational software.

I would love this feature as well. I use a data vault that has the equivalent of two levels of folders, although they’re not treated as folders. The top level is called “wallets” and I have “family” and “personal” and “work” and a few others to keep track of different high level categories of accounts. Under each wallet you can have one layer of folders (e.g., bank accounts, credit cards, credit card web sites, home network logins, ISPs, Mailing Lists, Utility Logins, Medical Logins, memberships, training, support logins, web store logins, travel sites, and so on).

This is super handy for keeping separate my personal accounts from my work accounts and from accounts of other people for whom I provide tech support and thus need to track.

I prefer to keep folders where most folders only have a few dozen items (at most) so I can quickly navigate to it.

A lack of this kind of feature is what prevents me from migrating from what I’m using today.

@tommy I accept your point of view. I votet for tagging-items-in-vault

+1, i’d like to migrate to your solution which is better i think :slight_smile:
But it’s a nessecity for me to have sub-folder.
have you an idea of how many time it will take ?

Thanks for your job and keep on going !

Allowing an arbitrary number of sub-folders to both other folders and collections would be a fantastic feature for managing large amounts of passwords.

I agree on having folders. While I search when it for something specific, I also use a hierarchical structure because my I have multiple geographic locations and contexts.

  • 1 for the nested folders structure + membership by tags!

When will sub-folders be released?

A beta version of nested folders has been released to the web vault (v2.5.0). Other apps will also include this ability in the future, but for now this is limited to the web vault for testing.

Nested folders work by using a naming convention with the forward slash character (/) as a delimiter. For example, if I have folders with the names “Work” and “Work/Email”, “Email” will be nested underneath the “Work” folder. There is no limit on the depth you can do with this, though the UI might start to break due to the nested indenting if you get too crazy.

Screenshot:

image

In this example I have the following folders:

  • Personal
  • Personal/Email
  • Personal/Email/Sub
  • Social
  • Work
  • Work/Clients
  • Work/Email

NOTE: This features also works for collections in your organizations, though it is only for display purposes. Collection access and permissions are not inherited by “children”.

Please let me know if you encounter any issues.

3 Likes

Hello kspearrin,

Thank you for implementing this function. That looks quite good after all!

2 questions:
1: What about the import of password files and their subfolders? That won’t work at the moment, but it will come, won’t it?
2: Will it be possible to create a subfolder directly from a parent folder with the button “Create folder”? So without the current detour with Folder/Subfolder/SubSubFolder…

I will test this and give a feedback.

Many greetings

  1. Not sure I understand. If you use the delimiter rule as defined above in your import file it will work just fine.

  2. No, for now you will need to type the name out as defined above each time you create a new folder.

1 Like

Screenshot of the desktop app for next version (1.10):

6 Likes

Any ideas when this update will be released ? I just bought multiple enterprise accounts to try and have to import folders/subfolders etc to organize database. Nested subfolders for collections should be developed in first place.

Hello kspearrin,

Issue;
Mac OS 10.13.6
Firefox 63.0.1
or
Chrome 70.0.3538

I try use subfolder type:
Test/123

but from Bitwarden Web Vault the name appears attached not in subfolder.

thank you
bye

Need to create “Test” folder too.

sorry… ok perfect now!

When release desktop app 1.10?

thank you

Desperate for this feature. Have a very complex nested folder structure in KeePass and I cannot migrate until this has been implemented.