2021-09-25: Obsidian October: develop stuff for a chance to earn prizes!

In The Community

• The Obsidian developers are doing an "Obsidian October" initiative / contest to encourage people to polish off their WIP plugins and themes, or even try their hand at developing one for the first time. Winners will get hundreds of dollars in credit to spend on Obsidian services; the top winner, as determined by a panel of community judges, will get a custom trophy. Even if you don't win, they're picking 3 random people to earn rewards too. Learn more on the new Obsidian publish hub.  Here's the forum thread for sharing your progress.
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff interviewed @Silver (Erica Xu) about why she developed Obsidian and the process of developing the community.
• Nick Milo featured content creator Mike Schmitz as part of the LYT House series awhile back — the recording is now on YouTube. Ditto David Sparks talking about how he uses Obsidian.
• There's now a community maintained vault intended to become a centralized hub for obsidian resources.

Obsidian Updates

• Obsidian Sync increased the size limit of each remote vault from 4 GB to 10 GB. Here's a video from Santi about how Sync works.

Plugin News

New

• There's a new plugin to add more shortcuts for LaTeX.
• It looks like the folks over at Club MacStories are trying out a business model for paid plugins: if you subscribe to the ClubMacStories newsletter you can get access to their Todoist Tasks, Markdown links, and Markdown embeds plugins. Here's their Twitter announcement.
• Metadataframe lets users extract all the metadata in a vault into a CSV file.
• Prominent Starred Notes adds stars to starred notes in the file explorer.
• Local images finds hotlinked images in your notes, downloads and saves them locally and finally adjusts the link in your note to point to the local file.
• MarginNote Companion lets users use MarginNote 3 to read and create text/area excerpt on PDF files and easily import notes to obsidian with backlinks to MarginNote. It synergizes with Media Extended to support importing video notes.
• If you play music and want to use Obsidian to keep track of scores, check out Scales & Chords.
• Here's a hotkey for superscript.
• Here's a plugin designed to help users use Obsidian as a Read It Later app.
• Here's a plugin to let you change the playback speed of audio files in Obsidian.

Updates

• Kanban 1.0.17 lets users search for notes by aliases, headings and blocks. Users can also drag folders into the card input field to create notes for each file under that folder.
• Recursive folder copying has been added to 0.2.0 of Enhance Copy Note.
• Obsidian42 - Jump-to-Date plugin got some nice navigation features for v1.0.9.
• Dice Roller now lets users save results of dicerolls and has a prettier dice view.
• v1.7 of MetaEdit fixes the KanbanHelper setting not being able to expand.
• Obsidian Leaflet updated to version 4.0.0. It's now faster, integrated with Initiate Tracker, allowes for layers on real-world maps, and lets you draw and edit shapes directly on maps.
• Toggl Track Integration for Obsidian v 0.3.0 comes with better support for tags.
• Obsidian Git v 1.13.0 supports custom git binary paths and cloning remote repos.
• v1.3.0 of Obsidian Trello lets users customize which part of a Trello card render in Obsidian.

Betas

• Cross Reference Navigation lets you navigate through notes using their tags. I don't have a great short explanation for it but it's kind of like a kanban board for your tags, and it's got a gorgeous interface. It's still in beta, but the author has an incredible website and vision. Highly recommend clicking through. Here's a youtube demo if you prefer those.

For Developers

• Here's an incredible new guide for how to develop plugins for Obsidian.
• Here's a pdf cheatsheet on Discord for base theme colors.
• Here's a community theme dev vault that contains a bunch of text files and fiddly plugin examples with all the special classes you might need to worry about during theme development.
• Here's a guide to styling Obsidian endorsed by the Obsidian devs.

Feature Requests

• Here's a request for a teleprompter plugin.
• If two-factor authentication is something you'd like to see added to Obsidian accounts, you can add your support to the feature request
• @brimwats provided a proof of concept for assigning library subject headings to a note which would be neat for bringing controlled knowledge management vocabularies to Obsidian. If you're looking for a project for Obsidian October, this is a neat one!
• Here's a request for a plugin to do fancy highlighting for types of words / regex a la iA Writer.

Appearance

• Here's a neat css snippet to hide fold arrows unless the line is active.
• the Alternate Checkboxes snippet adds a bunch of nice checkbox stylings to Obsidian and should work with most themes. It also shipped with the new ITS theme update.
• Here's @dannyhatcher looking at every single Obsidian theme on YouTube. 🙈 I need to find time to update Palatinate.

Ancillary Code

• This dataviewjs snippet provides a dashboard for getting the wordcount from a folder, which is handy for longform writing.
• @Murf shared four templater scripts to quickly open up DNP type needs in the Search bar quickly and without losing current context: one two, three, four.
• Here's how to use dataviewjs and obsidian-charts to generate a chart based on dataview inline fields.

Guides

• Nick Milo, creator of the Linking Your Thinking system, is working on a paid Obsidian course called "Obsidian Flight School." It drops next month. You can sign up for the waitlist here.
• Dan Allosso put together a video about how he gets information from PDFs into Obsidian using Hypothesis and Readwise.
• Here's a video guide for getting handwritten notes on the iPad into Obsidian.
• Here's a StackExchange discussion about how to get Markdown to place nice with Google docs.

Tips

• You can use .txt files and the text as md plugin to omit certain files from the quick switcher and Obsidian's core search without having to worry about filtering.
• If you are not already familiar with what the insert key on some keyboards does, please copy and paste this paragraph into a text file, find the "Insert" or "Ins" key on your keyboard, put your cursor into the middle of the paragraph, and start typing... because I'm pretty sure this is the most common recurring bug report we get. A surprising number of people aren't familiar with this incredibly obnoxious key on their keyboard.
• This is your periodic reminder to back up your files responsibly and regularly.

Discussions

• @pseudometa shared the list of plugins they use for longform writing and discussed their process further here on Discord.
• Here's a nice Reddit thread about how to set up Obsidian to be maximally future-proofed and cross-compatible.

In The Wild

• Here's a digital garden from a creator who describes himself as a researcher, musician, designer, photographer and filmmaker. If you like checking out robust public vaults with lots of notes that aren't about notetaking, I highly recommend it! It's a neat example of the LYT methodology.

Ancillary Tools

• The developer of Drafts for iOS published a step-by-step guide for integrating Obsidian with Drafts.

Housekeeping

• I finally put together my thoughts on the perennial "folders vs. tags" debate. It's like 4,000 words but the tl;dr is that I like folders due to their cross compatibility, future proofing, interoperability, flexibility, focus, clarity, automation management &etc.
• I wrote this while somewhat woozy from taking a muscle relaxer because I tweaked my back a little. If there are more errors than normal (there's always  at least one!) I'm super sorry.