🌠 Templater Scripts, Sync workarounds & Obsidian for Work

In The Community

• There was a lovely discussion prompted by @AB1908 about what motivates people to write.
• The Leveraging Metadata and Bending Markdown talk has been cancelled, but we'll be hosting instead a Metadata Group Discussion on the same date and time (May 30th 8PM CET). Details here.

Plugin News

New

• the MetaEdit plugin by @Chhrriissyy allows users to easily update YAML properties and Dataview fields, mark a task as completed (from anywhere), and the file will be updated with the new count. It also auto updates properties in files linked to from Kanban boards on lane change. Requires manual install.
• Obsidian Dictionary requires manual install but creates a nifty "dictionary view" pane.
• Supercharged links allows for some neat features for styling internal links. It also allows users to change any dataview inline field or frontmatter by right-clicking on an internal link.

Updates

• Excalidraw 1.1.0 by @zsviczian had an update that discontinued code block embedding and implemented native ![[drawing.excalidraw]] embedding. The MIGRATE command in the command palette should let you convert your old Excalidraw code blocks.
• The Image in Editor plugin now displays Excalidraw drawings in markdown mode.
• MediaExtended 2.6.0 by @AidenLx has new features to get timestamp from player and open timestamp link on external video.
• Buttons 0.4.7 by @shabegom now has text buttons.
• Tracker 1.5 by @pyrochlore added two new search types. searchType 'table' lets you extract data from a table and then make a plot for it while searchType 'dvField' allows retrieving data in "dataview plugin's inline field" format. @bettyzhang has an example here.
• Pane Relief by @pjeby now allows you to right-click on Obsidian's history arrows.

Under The Radar

• Focus Mode by @ryanpcmcquen makes it easier to focus on a particular writing task by hiding some of the information Obsidian provides.

Magic

• @zsviczian created a workaround to Sync plugin settings with Obsidian Sync via Templater on GitHub. This should be helpful for iOS users. There are more details here.
• @zsviczian also shared how to add syntax highlighting to templater scripts.
• @RoamHacker put together a Dataview script designed to give a more useful view of tasks by date, separated out by overdue, soon, due, and undated.
• @Yas created a dataviewjs query to replicate the "on this day" timehop-style feature that some apps have.
• @shabegom created a Templater script that prompts for a query and then shows notes and lines that include the query.
• @Christian shared a bunch of Templater scripts, including a Readwise importer and a QuickAdd that lets you append quick notes to a specified file.
• @Murf shared this Templater script to turn a discord conversation into a well-formatted markdown note awhile back, but it's still getting a lot of interest so I thought it might be nice to resurface it.

For Developers

• There was a fascinating discussion about Promises and JavaScript that could be really valuable for anyone interested in learning to create plugins for Obsidian who isn't already good at JavaScript.
• If a .gif for your plugin isn't correctly playing in the obsidian community plugins browser, try using the link to the raw GitHub resource instead of the internal links in GitHub.

Workflow Stuff

• There was a share & showcase thread about using Obsidian for work that had a couple of people in technical industries chime in.
• iOS users are advised by @ryanjamurphy to use iOS gestures to make copying and pasting easier in Obsidian. More details here.  
• You can set a binding for the swap line up/down hotkey. This is a core feature that many users weren't aware of, but they were pretty thrilled when they found out!

Feature Requests

• a writeup on "the absolute state of syncing things between devices as relevant for obsidian" would be valuable. If someone knowledgeable on the topic can put that together (even just a meta post linking to stuff like the git options / the summaries about why iOS is hinky, the issues with Google Drive etc) many people would be grateful (and I will add it to the big meta resources post on the roundup).
• The desire to see the results of dataview queries (among other things) render in the graph was discussed.
• A couple of different people asked about a plugin to allow for the custom rearranging of notes and folders on the sidebar, which has come up a lot. After I asked about how viable it would be to do that, @danieltomasz proposed a solution that might be easier to implement: creating a new navigation pane (a la the starred notes plugin) that is more flexible.

Appearance

• This nifty CSS hack will make the wordcount report screen flicker less.
• SlRvb has a version of "aside" CSS that leverages how <i>, <s>, & <b> allow for markdown code to work inside them. The theme repo for ITS has a bunch of handy snippets.
• @Mara offered up a snippet to hide files in the Obsidian explorer.
• @yungbananapeel figured out how to make dataview tables look like gallery cards.

Knowledge Management

• @itsTimConnors put together a nice "getting started" guide for knowledge management that also covers relationship management & recording information about entities like people and companies.
• This reddit discussion started by @joshduffney had a really great discussion of "what not to do" when it comes to taking notes, and @tyhe added on with a bunch of background about Luhmann and the origins of the Zettelkasten method that I think were very informative.

Ancillary Tools

• a list of GUI programs that use Tesseract, an open source OCR engine, to use a mobile device with a camera to translate images into text, via @brimwats
• @argentum had a really nice explanation of vim, for those who have always sort of wondered what it is and why people like it.
• Bitwarden is a free and open source password manager used by many in the Obsidian community. Please do not store your passwords in a plain text medium like Obsidian files.