2021-07-03: Sync Updates, URI improvements, & workflows

In The Community

• The recording of the last Community Talk, What your Vault Knows, which involves three short presentations and a discussion about using computational methods to extract knowledge from our vaults, is now online on YouTube.
• The devs are experimenting with a new Discord role aimed at connecting people who want to hire a developer to implement their ideas with developers who are open to these opportunities.

Obsidian Updates

• The Insider Build (12.9) lets Obsidian Sync be used to synchronize your settings, appearance tweaks, custom CSS, and installed plugins. It can now sync any file type using the “Sync all other types” option.

Plugin News

New

Note: Some of these are pending code review and are not yet available in the community store. They may require manual installation.

• Map View looks incredible for trip planning & taking notes about places you’ve been.
• You can now query the Amazing Marvin API for a list of tasks.
• the Obsidian & reMarkable plugin is looking for Windows testers.
• the Obsidian Initiative Tracker should make things easier for people who are using Obsidian to run tabletop RPGs.
• @death_au created a new command URI plugin that should allow for the creation of a system-wide hotkey to create new notes from anywhere. It opens up uri schemes to plugins that haven't necessarily defined them. I think it’s intended for things like this method to use ULauncher, an alternative to Alfred for Linux, to help with quick capture of thoughts into a daily note.
• Obsidian Pocket allows you to sync your Pocket reading list into Obsidian, so that you can easily create Obsidian notes directly from your Pocket reading list.

Updates

• You can now schedule tweets with NoteTweet. For what it’s worth, NoteTweet is the absolute best (& cheapest) way to write Twitter threads that I’ve found anywhere. We also recently discussed how tweets can be used as a type of atomic note conversation.
• QuickAdd can now detect the end of sections, and the format syntax suggester will now help you write formats easier. There were also some updates to the documentation and some bugfixes. Date offset functionality was added, and there’s a new API feature for variables. It’s up to 3.0 now.
• obsidian smart typography has been updated to support customizing the open/closing quote characters.
• The Dictionary plugin (which has been way more useful for me personally than I thought it would be) now supports caching, which helps with offline / slow internet usage.

Under The Radar

• The dice roller plugin lets you randomly select entries from a table, as in this example. This can be used for, say, generating writing prompts.
• Better Footnotes is really nice. If you use footnotes and aren’t using it, it might help: it lets you preview on hover with footnote links.
• There’s a plugin that assigns hotkeys to starred files. It will, for example, let you jump quickly to an index note.

For Developers

• This shell script via @koala will make it easier to beta test plugins; it facilitates updating plugins which are not in the Obsidian community plugin store. This discord post has more details.
• Obsidian’s config file has been split up into 4 different files.
• registerMarkdownPostProcessor and registerMarkdownCodeBlockProcessor will now return the MarkdownPostProcessor callback function to facilitate manual un-registration.

Workflow Stuff

• Moderator @cotemaxime shared the full breakdown of their productivity system over on their blog. It pulls from David Allen’s “Getting Things Done,” Tiago Forte (who recently said some nice things about Obsidian), Cal Newport and more. It’s a great example of mashing together best practices from various sources to land on what works for you, which Maxime also wrote a guide for.
• @joshduffney recorded & shared their smart notes workflow in Obsidian.
• @mutton44 shared a somewhat hacky way to get obsidian to work on two monitors with the same vault on Windows 10. I don’t know if I’d be brave enough to try it, but I’d be remiss to not share.

Feature Requests

• @edith posted a feature request for keeping the focus in the current panel/tab.
• There’s a feature request to highlight the active note on graph view that got resurfaced.

Appearance

• @bobheadxi created a script to sync global graph settings to the local graphs.
• There’s a new dark theme in town; check out Rmaki.

Knowledge Management

• @anthonyamar shared this curated list of public Zettelkastens / Second Brains / Digital Gardens.
• @Animalistic shared a very popular method for choosing when to skim, when to focus, and when to highlight when processing a text.
• There was a nice reddit thread about how to use Dataview to track books.

Ancillary Tools

• Scholarcy, an online summarizing tool & flashcard generator, added Markdown export to their Chrome Extension, so it's easier to get full text research papers, including key findings and references, into Obsidian.
• After some discussion of tab organizers, Session Buddy was shared as a nice way to keep browser tabs organized by source in an outline format.
• ActivityWatch is a free and open source device tracker that can be used to keep track of your productivity, time spent on different projects, bad screen habits, or just to understand how you spend your time.