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2021-07-10: New UUID plugin, better mindmaps, & a user survey.

Fancy project cards, updates to a mobile-optimized theme, & .md -> docx without pandoc.

Eleanor Konik
Written by Eleanor Konik

I write stories & articles inspired by all eras of history & science... so I wind up putting notetaking software like Obsidian & Readwise thru their paces.

4 min read.

Obsidian Updates

  • The Insider Build is up to 12.10 now. It’s mostly sync fixes, but that means that since hotkeys are now stored in a separate file, if you’re using Obsidian on multiple devices you might notice that your hotkeys will disappear on non-upgraded Obsidian instances when using Obsidian Sync to sync your app config. To migrate, upgrade Obsidian and turn on the hotkeys sync flag to receive the hotkeys, then restart Obsidian.

Plugin News

New

  • My hero @mrjackphil is back creating plugins by request, this time tackling a plugin that will open notes by UID. It opens notes by UID by checking the frontmatter field.
  • Enhanced Mindmaps can do a lot of nifty stuff for, well, making better mindmaps.
  • tq v0.1.0 is a task management plugin that uses a separate note to back each task and renders them in customizable code blocks.

Updates

Magic

  • I’m going to mangle this explanation, but @kaelri shared how they make project cards using Templater and Dataview and it got bookmarked 66 times, so check it out if you’re somebody who enjoys content cards. One way to think of it is that it’s like a prettier / less table-like dataview view (thanks for walking me through it, @anthonybaker).

Under The Radar

  • There was a fun discussion of everybody’s top 3 favorite plugins that I recommend checking out if you’re not sure where to start. Plus, it’s fun to see how different people have such varied use-cases.

For Developers

  • If you are trying to debug plugins for android, you need to have Android Debug Bridge on your computer installed; on your android phone you have to enable ADB (it's under developer settings – tap the build number three times to get these settings); then connect the phone to your computer over USB; open chrome (or chromium based browser should also work) and type chrome://inspect in the browser. Open obsidian on your phone, then it should appear.

Workflow Stuff

Feature Requests

Appearance

  • The Yin and Yang theme got an update. Among other things, @chetachi added base hue and saturation customization! You can now easily and uniformly change the base colors to the theme. Yin and Yang is an excellent theme all around, but is also one of the few I’m aware of that is optimized for mobile.
  • This Reddit thread is a really nice collection of different ways to color code text.

Knowledge Management

Ancillary Tools

  • If anyone is looking for a Working Copy alternative (aka iOS only), Polygit is $2/mo or $10/year and lets you clone a repo directly into the Obsidian folder. (via @Krafty)
  • Anecdotally, MGit is the favored git-for-mobile option for Android, but I don’t think anybody has figured out a way to auto-sync a git repo on android (although the latest mobile update might have changed that, so if you get autosync of a git repo working on mobile please reach out).

Housekeeping

A question for y'all: If a major update happens, would you rather I wait until the usual Saturday roundup or would you rather I send an email the day it happens?

I'm thinking of examples like, say, Obsidian mobile releases for the free tier. I spent like 10 minutes trying to come up with other hypotheticals and most of them I decided I wouldn't actually want to send an email for, so fundamentally you'd have to be trusting my judgment here. I'm thinking about the kind of rare situations (mobile, the API stabilizing, that kind of thing) where @everyone gets a ping in Discord, but people who aren't on Discord would miss out even if they update Obsidian itself, not stuff like "an obsidian tutorial course is having a flash sale."

Anyway, email me if you'd like the extra email. If you don't let me know, I'm going to assume you don't want the extra email, tho. I promise not to spam you, though: it's extra work for me to send the email ;)

Note: There are a couple of affiliate links & codes scattered around, but these always come from links I was already recommending and usually I share them because they benefit you too (i.e. getting you extra time on trials).

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