2021-09-04: View ![[transclusions]] in edit mode & an end to early bird pricing!

Obsidian Updates

• There are now over 300 plugins and 40k members of the community Discord!
• The early bird discount pricing for Sync and Publish is ending at the end of this month (September 30, 2021). Please read the FAQ and remember: Obsidian is created by a very small team of two and they only seem to charge personal users for services that cost them money (servers aren't cheap, especially if you don't have economy of scale advantages).

v0.12.15 is now available for public access, featuring:

• Improved graph timelapse animation that's ordered by creation time.
• Right click on a heading to rename and update all links to this heading.
• Right click on selected text to search for it globally.

Appearance

• Shimmering Focus is a condensed minimalist theme aimed at working nicely with pandoc. It has a bunch of really nice features, like increased contrast.

Plugins

New

• Obsidian plaintext will let you edit .bib and presumably .css files etc. directly in Obsidian instead of needing a text editor like Visual Studio Code (although there isn't any syntax highlighting, it's not meant as a replacement for VSCode or whatnot).
• You can now get a direct feed from the Hacker News top stories into an Obsidian pane. Presumably it wouldn't be too hard to add other RSS feeds to this by forking it or creating a pull request?
• Obsidian copy block link lets you right click a block and copy the link to the block.
• A new plugin lets you execute jupyter notebooks, which I'm told are super useful for the data science / machine learning folks, since the python code can actually do computations and then render them.
• There's a new riff off of focus mode: ghost fade focus.
• Random structural diary will give you a random list of questions to journal about.
• This plugin integrates drawio diagramming. If anybody knows how this is different than excalidraw or mermaid I'm interested.
• Obsidian file link makes it easier for people to link to external files without having to drag and drop from the file explorer.

Updates

• The Image in Editor plugin has commands to convert Wikilinks to Markdown links and vice-versa in all files within the vault or only in the active file. This is amazing for switching to wikilinks for seeing transclusions in editor mode using this plugin, or for people trying to convert to Markdown links for interoperability with other programs like static site generators.
• Quick Explorer 0.0.7  has more hotkey support and a quick preview mode. It also has a really amazing Readme.
• The Spaced Repetition plugin got some love; more statistics, you can review cards from a single note if you want, and some niftier post-review edit options.
• Obsidian Tasks v1.3.0 has new sorting options, better CSS support, and mobile toolbar icons.
• Excalidraw 1.2.21  supports transclusion of sections in addition to blocks. 1.3.0 has an extended ExcalidrawAutomate API that lets users access elements of the active drawing and add elements on the fly.
• cMenu now has a status bar menu and got some QoL updates.

For Developers

• Here's a nice guide for new programmers who are starting out learning because of Obsidian, written by a programmer who started out programming because of Obsidian.
• Here's a discussion about inter-plugin communication that is probably important as a central discussion point for best practices for exposing plugin APIs from plugins.
• @jgauthier is working on a big update to the Citations plugin and is looking for CSS/design help and feedback (or contributions to development). Here's the development branch.
• Theme developers should be on the lookout for breaking changes coming to the kanban plugin, which is currently beta testing custom drag and drop and some other stuff like hotkeys and lists.
• This script will download all of the Obsidian plugin repositories to use as a reference for developing plugins.

Requests

• There was discussion about the possibility of creating a docker instance of a webtop window manager and running obsidian on it. If someone could put together a guide for "how to run Obsidian on a server so that you can access it from the web" I feel confident that a great many people would appreciate it.
• Rendering citations in preview mode was requested. There's was a good discussion about ways to get started in Discord.

Guides

• Did you know that you can use a \ backslash to escape characters, so that they aren't treated as markdown commands and will therefore render in preview without needing to be commented using a backtick?
• This is a really nice video guide for how to process source notes into permanent notes and what Obsidian features help.
• The video from the Buttons community talk from Buttons developer @shabegom is now live on YouTube.
• @Christian shared a QuickAdd script and process for importing notes that emulates other automatic importers but allows a bit more control.
• @productivity guru shared a guide for using Templater to insert variables and functions into your notes.
• @zsviczian shared a video of how to implement the Clothesline Method for Sequencing Ideas using Templater and Excalidraw. Here's part two.
• Here's a Reddit discussion and video about how to get things from the virtual tabletop Foundry into Obsidian.
• Here's a script using netlify as an alternative to Obsidian publish.
• Here's how Mac/iOS users can use keyboard maestro for quick capture and inbox processing.

Different Usecases

• @JeremyMcLellan shared in Discord how he uses Obsidian for standup comedy.
• @SlRvb shared a sample vault for journaling.
• On Discord, @Vincer shared a list of the plugins that help them have a more visual experience with Obsidian.
• On Discord, @pseudometa had a widely-bookmarked comment about why and when highlighting and extracting notes can be more valuable than summarizing the main points of a text
• Here are some nice starter templates.
• A user on Reddit shared their workflow for task and project management in Obsidian.

Ancillary Tools

• @pseudometa shared detailed documentation for how they use the (mac-only) tool Alfred with Obsidian. Lots of gems there for Alfred users, I suspect.
• @argentum created an issue on Github to track the migration of Mdnotes to the new Zotero beta. You can subscribe if you're looking for updates.
• @Santi Younger shared a video about the Readwise integration with Obsidian.
• Duplicati is a free & open source backup client that securely stores encrypted, incremental, compressed backups on cloud storage services and remote file servers. It works on OSX, Windows and Linux. @peterOlson says it was easy. Since Obsidian Sync is not a backup service and as best practice you should separate backups from sync, it's been recommended as a nice companion.
• @pseudometa shared their note about different PDF annotation extraction methods, with some pros/cons of every tool, as .md file on Discord.

Housekeeping

• If you're curious to see how my theory about writing gestalt book reviews is helpful for processing knowledge panned out, I wrote a twitter thread reflecting on how the process of reviewing Tamed by Alice Roberts (which is about the history of domestication) helped me understand the book better.
• My new theme apparently moves the Roundup's RSS feed to this link sorry about that if it breaks something for you!