2021-05-08: Templater, Syncthing & Requested Plugins

In The Community

• Federico Viticci (of MacStories fame) discussed Obsidian (and some in-development plugins) on this episode of Connected.
• Theoretical physicist Francisco Bricio spoke about how to manage projects, tasks, people, and yourself using Obsidian with @nickmilo over at Linking Your Thinking.
• This teacher reflects on how using Obsidian in the classroom to create a class vault went.

Community Talks

• The Zotero 101 community talk is available on YouTube. Here's Part 1: Basics & Part 2: Plugins.
• The CSS 101 intro and Q&A talk by @Lithou scheduled for today at 4pm Eastern Time.
• @TallGuyJenks is doing the Metadata talk on May 30th 11:00 GMT-7.

Obsidian Releases

• Obsidian Release v0.12.2 (Insider build) will let people pin commands at the top of the command palette, and mobile developers have some nifty functions for allowing things to be added to the editor toolbar. Obsidian Sync improvements also shipped out.

Plugin News

New

• @iller made a plugin for making components with reactjs inside Obsidian.
• For folks looking for a pomodoro timer, there's a stopwatch plugin in the works.
• With a lot of help from @mrjackphil I finalized the first version of the Concatenate Plugin I've been talking about for months. It must be manually installed, but can be used to pull individual sections out of a series of files in a folder, for example the ### Reading Log section of my daily notes, which I used to populate my monthly reading roundup.

Updates

• Excalidraw 1.0.8 now features Templater support, along with some quality of life improvements centered around saving.
• The Obsidian Kindle plugin handles myclippings.txt now. It also has support for some more stuff from the Kindle API, like the publication date & book cover URL.
• Dataview has a new API for javascript and fancy new documentation. @skepticmystic shared a dataviewjs codeblock that will return a single-level list of all tags in your vault, without duplicates.
• Kanban 0.2.0 has been released with basic date support.
• Templater v1.6.0 includes dynamic templates triggered in preview mode with <%+, user scripts, support for js files from a folder inside your vault and more.
• There was an update for Obsidian Tasks that has some fancypants editing ability. It's not available in the community plugins list and requires Obsidian 0.12 to work, but it's a nifty new task management plugin that got a lot of love on Reddit.
• Buttons, which lets you run commands from a button (instead of the command palette, for instance) had a major update to allow for nifty stuff with block-ids.

Under The Radar

• This discussion covers some different ways to interact with non-markdown files in Obsidian.
• The leaflet plugin lets you have maps with markers/pins in your vault. This is handy for lots of people, but particularly authors. Here's an example of why via @SlRvb. Apparently you can also use spaced-repetition with Leaflet plugin to make image occlusion review (via @boninall)
• The obsidian comments plugin, which lets you annotate your notes, got re-surfaced.

For Developers

• via @liam: if you are gating UI or interface behavior, use isMobile/isDesktop but if you are checking for the availability of node.js libs or desktop-only features, use isMobileApp/isDesktopApp.

Workflow Stuff

• This github repository contains a bunch of starter templates for different use-cases (for example tracking tools, researching, etc).
• @Murf created a demo video for "how to set up your first Templater script." They also put together a nifty roundup of resources centered around how Obsidian block references differ from those in other tools.
• @shabegom had a helpful summary of how the readwise community plugin works.

Academic

• There was a nice discussion on reddit about "getting started" with Obsidian as an Academic.
• There was a really nice discussion on Discord about what different people's literature notes look like.

Mobile

• There was a discussion in the #mobile channel about Syncthing maybe being viable syncing between iOS, android, PC and Mac (and Linux). If you have any knowledge about this, please put together a guide and let us know about it. Möbius Sync seems to be a way to get Syncthing on iOS.
• A nifty trick for keeping desktop and mobile setups differently is going into the settings > about > override config folder section and changing which folder mobile (or desktop) uses to store its settings.

Feature Requests

• @dcoales  asked about the viability of a plugin for spacially organized notes on a "canvas."
• There's been some discussion about a proper genealogy plugin for better management of family trees. Mermaid can't quite handle them correctly, but for story vaults and ancestry research, it would be super handy.
• The ability to save node positions in graph view got discussed again.
• @omarkhafagy requested better plugin management with the ability to group plugins into folders.
• There was a request for the ability to "pin" the header of a document, which might be particularly useful for people who use the sliding panes plugin.

CSS Stuff

• @nickmilo pushed an update to the Cybertron theme.
• A YouTube tutorial about how to create a custom theme with snippets by @Reggie got resurfaced.
• There was a snippet shared for styling dates & completed cards for the kanban plugin.
• @foreveryone shared a handy trick with styling <i> that allows for the creation of columns.
• There was a discussion of how to highlight sections of text without having to rely on spans over at Reddit, with a couple of different possible solutions if that's something you're interested in.
• Here's a snippet that will let your headings automatically have a gradient based on a particular color, via @Connor96.

Ancillary Tools

• Espanso is a popular text replacement tool that lets you get create templates that will autocomplete text, for example turning ::now into a timestamp, or ---- into — or whatnot. It even also allows for a system-wide autocorrect, which is nice since Obsidian doesn't really have that feature built-in (although the LanguageTool plugin is pretty nice). Here's a handy list of resources.
• Screenotate is apparently an easy way to grab text from a screenshot (via @smithtjosh)
• @tallguyjenks did a review of GingkoApp, which is a nifty mix of outliner, kanban board, writing organizer, and longform writing tool.
• @Joschua created a script to import stuff from Goodreads into Obsidian.