2021-10-30: Community Initiatives, 8 New Themes (!), & an RSS Reminder

In The Community

• The Obsidian Hub just had a major restructure. It now has support for searching for themes according to features like whether they support the Style Settings plugin. You can contribute — one easy way is to share your note templates. You don't need to know git you can use the GitHub web interface (I tried it this morning and it went fine).
• If you're an Obsidian Publish site owner and you'd like to showcase your site, DM @Silver the link to your site. She's looking for more sites to feature on the Obsidian Publish page.
• If you contributed to Obsidian October with a new theme or plugin, please submit your project!
• According to @ryanjamurphy's notes, more than one plugin has been developed per day in the first year of the Obsidian API being available.
• Discord users, if you see malicious bot messages, please reply to them with: !report <report reason> so the moderators know, thanks :) Also: please enable some kind of 2FA for your account and don't click suspicious links about free Nitro!
• I've been asked a couple of times for my thoughts on community building and how to foster healthy communities like this one, so I collated some resources and wrote down the a (succinct? comprehensive? can it be both?) version of what came out of those conversations.
• The Obsidian Community is doing National Novel Writing Month. Join us on the forum or the #nanowrimo thread in the #creative channel to update us on your progress and commiserate. You can also check out the Obsidian Word Sprint plugin (currently in beta and iterating fast!) to get in-app encouragement to focus on writing.

Plugin News

Note: Not all new plugins are available in the community list yet, as they need to go through code review first. You can manually install plugins that aren't in the community list yet by using the Beta Reviewer's Auto-update Tool. Note, though, that this is not as safe as waiting for them to go through code review.

New

• The new graph analysis plugin analyses your vault to computes useful relations between the notes in your vault.
• Here's a new plugin to extend highlight functionality.
• If there are no files open and you open one (or create a new one), auto-split will automatically open both editor and preview panes side by side.
• Image Caption lets you caption embedded images using the pipe character, i.e. ![[my_amazing_image.png|Check out this amazing picture.]]
• Lineup Builder lets you build football lineups using codeblocks, which I bet could be awesome for coaches and sports writers.
• AnkiBridge is another Anki integration plugin.
• There's a new pomodoro plugin designed to be flexible and allow for logging.
• You can now sync from Habitica.
• You can now copy as LaTeX or copy frontmatter key values.
• Extended Multi Cursor is a bit simpler than advanced-cursors, and brings some sublime text keybindings and allows click-to-deselect on existing selections.
• You can now look up the 24h price for a particular cryptocurency in a particular currency thanks to crypto lookup.
• Obsidian can now process information from an Oura Ring.
• You can now customize your attachment locations using variables.
• You can now embed asciicast files in Obsidian.

Updates

• CodeMirror Options 0.5.0 allows for Mathjax rendering in edit mode. Alternatively, you can check out Obsidian editor math which lets users preview latex math in obsidian CodeMirror editors.
• Advanced Cursors got a bunch of updates — you can now copy the current selection of lines up/down (like Alt + Shift + Arrow in VS Code).
• BRAT now has a command for quickly opening the Github repository page for a plugin
• The status bar for the Pomodoro plugin was extended with some additional features that mimics some of the feature of TickTick.
• Fantasy Calendar now has support for week notes.
• Excalidraw 1.4.2 has a new arrow type, new command palette options to add images from the vault, some performance improvements, and new ways to resolve urls. Here's a getting started video guide for Excalidraw from @Santi Younger by the way.
• Another Quick Switcher v1.1.0 allows users to create a new note by pressing Shift + Enter or Shift + Mod + Enter. This plugin supports mobile.
• WordNet 2.0.0 has support for slash commands and templating functionality.
• Link Archive got some bugfixes and improvements.

Betas

• Luna: Dark Mode Switcher is a fork of @kepano's System Dark Mode. It adds the option for defining a manual time frame or following the sun, which is handy on mobile.

Under The Radar

• Don't forget there's a regex search/replace plugin
• Did you know that you can drag and drop from zotero into the kanban plugin?
• You can generate other code snippets using dv.paragraph() from dataviewjs
• You can copy a graph with a transparent background using the copy screenshot button in the "hamburger" 3-dot menu so you can paste graph screenshots to Discord without getting yelled at by people who hate light mode 🙃 or was that just me?
• Did you know you can add progress bars to Obsidian notes with simple HTML? <progress value="6" max="10"></progress>

For Developers

• There is now an Obsidian Community Library, an npm package of commonly used plugin utilities. Here's the documentation.
• Theme designers — if you want to let users know which plugins your theme has been tested with, the hub can automatically add that to your theme note. Check this note and Shimemring Focus as an example.
• Theme designers, please try to avoid using !important. Here are some other tips about CSS best practices.

Feature Requests

• Here's a feature request to improve the Obsidian Publish CSS experience.
• Here's a related request to improve the SEO of Publish pages that was also resurfaced this week.
• Mass search & replace remains a popular request
• Some folks on Reddit would love to see a CookLang plugin for Obsidian because apparently there's a recipe markup language we could be using.

Appearance

Snippets

• The External Link Icons snippet now has a Style Settings dropdown to change the default link icon to any browser icon or no icon at all.
• Here's a snippet from Discord to make a blockquote look like a handwritten letter.
• You can turn off spellcheck underlines in just the YAML.

Theme Updates

• Sanctum 0.2.4 was updated to include basically all of the functionality from Palatinate (<blockquote class=paraphrase>, fancy footnotes, and <cite>, etc) and way more. Palatinate users should definitely check it out. It now supports dataview table row colors, progress bar colors, and enough other awesome features that it's the theme I'm currently using.
• Shimmering Focus ⟡ has support for max size images, annotation tags, support for more plugins, new style settings options, and more.

New Themes

• Obsidian You is a theme designed for Android mobile reflecting Google's Material Design guidelines. It has a floating button to make it easier to switch in and out of preview mode 😍
• There's a fun new theme called Ebullientworks with a lovely plum/marigold color scheme.
• Friendly Theme has a really nice HR bar and dark blue color & yellow scheme.
• Prism is a new theme designed to be highly customizable.
• Golden Book makes your obsidian vault look sepia-coloured, like an old book. It has some neat stylings for <aside> and headers.
• Amethyst got forked into Carnelian (which supports <cite> 😍) and Ruby.
• Pine Forest Berry is a riff off of Dracula with a nice green/pink color palette.
• Cardstock is a light mode theme with nice founded corners.

Ancillary Code

• This video iOS users how to setup quick note capture using a 3 step Siri Shortcut. This one showcases a Siri Shortcut that automates handwritten note capture on an IPad so entries appear as appended timestamped text in a timelog note within Obsidian.
• Here's a quick Capture flow for Android using Automate.

Guides

• @curtismchale put together a YouTube video about using Workspaces

Discussions

• Some people did not know that RSS still exists. If you, too, thought RSS dead, I beg you to re-evaluate the landscape, because RSS is awesome. Did you know you can get this Roundup as an RSS feed? And the Discourse forum for Obsidian? And email newsletters? And Reddit?
• Here's a discussion about how to use Obsidian for political science.
• Here's a discussion of why Obsidian is helpful for Computer Science students.

Knowledge Management

• Regina M. Ponciano's Research Workflow explains her process from references to fleeting notes to literature notes to permanent notes to a manuscript. She covers Zotero and Zotero plug-ins, Obsidian and Pandoc.
• Here's a nice video about how to achieve more while studying less that got resurfaced.

In The Wild

• Obsidian was featured on this Stack Overflow podcast at 22:35.
• Obsidian was mentioned in this comparison of Private Notetaking Apps from Techlore.

Ancillary Tools

• Here's a twitter thread explaining the proof of concept toolchain for moving Remarkable highlights to Readwise.
• Here's a Syntax for the Draft's app that copies Obsidian's Markdown Style, e.g. #tags, %%comments%%, ==highlights== etc.

Housekeeping

• Moderator @koala reminded me that I've been writing the Obsidian Roundup for 6 months now. To celebrate the Roundup's Unbirthday, I want to be totally selfish. If you think I write a decent newsletter with a high signal to noise ratio and have any interest whatsoever in obscure history, weird biology, speculative fiction or worldbuilding, please check out my other newsletter, The Iceberg. It's the project I actually use Obsidian for, and I'm really proud of it. Thank you 💚