🌠 Obsidian Publish Improvements & Task Management Tips

In The Community

• The Obsidian Discord now has a #task-management channel.
• The Art and Craft of Systems Change: Practical Tools for a Complex World, a book co-authored by moderator Ryan J. A. Murphy, came out this week.

Obsidian Updates

v0.14.6 requires an installer update, but should fix the issue with PDFs. You can now add folders to an ignore filter, there's an improved spellcheck handling of text styling, and more.

Plugin News

New in Community Plugins

If you're one of the people who likes to wait until plugins are in the in-app community list, these plugins just passed through code review and are now available.

• Obsius Publish by @jonstodle integrates with obsius.site to publish individual notes on the web.
• Scroll Offset by @lijyze works like scrolloff in vim or cursor surrounding lines in Visual Studio Code.
• Snippet Downloader by @Mara-Li helps to manage downloaded css snippets.
• Book Search by @anpigon helps you find books and create notes.
• Obsidian jTab by @davfive is great for guitarists who want to take notes about guitar tabs & chords.
• Typing speed by @Supercip971 shows the current typing speed in the status bar
• Paste image rename by @reorx makes it easy to rename image after pasting
• Wordnik Definitions by @lizard-heart grabs information from Wordnik (a dictionary/thesarus) for a topic and brings it into Obsidian notes
• Execute Code by @twibiral allows executable code snippets within a note.
• Daily notes opener by @reorx gives extra control over daily notes with hotkeys.
• Better CodeBlock by @stargrey adds titles & line numbers to codeblocks.
• Obsidian Google Tasks by @YukiGasai lets users interact with Google Tasks more easily.
• Latex Suite by @artisticat1 adds shortcuts & text expansions to help speed up writing LaTeX.
• Doubleshift by @Qwyntex lets users open the command palette by pressing Double Shift like in IntelliJ and create your own shortcuts
• List Modified by @franciskafieh links all modified files meeting certain criteria to a daily note.

Pending (as of Friday morning)

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 most 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.

• Auto Card Link by @nekoshita automatically fetches metadata from a url and creates a codeblock to turn it into a card-styled link
• Plugins Galore by @dylanpizzo is an alternative to BRAT that allows for easy sideloading other plugins without being in the beta-testing stream, or being limited to github sources.
• Reset checkboxes by @branwall adds commands to check or reset all checkboxes in the open file.
• Variables by @jffaust adds support for variables, but doesn't work in Live Preview.
• Scroll Speed by @flolu lets users control scroll speed.
• Rewarder by @Gnopps is a configurable plugin to suggest rewards for completing tasks.
• Todoist Link by @dennisseidel lets users create Todoist tasks and projects with bidirectional links.
• Notion Video by @LastKnightCoder lets users embed your notion videos in obsidian
• Mkdocs Publisher by @Mara-Li is a plugin that helps with Publish alternatives.
• Obsidian Columns by @tnichols217 helps users create columns.

Updates

If you want a comprehensive list of what plugins updated this week, check out this plugin updates index by Ganessh Kumar.

• Multi Column Markdown has improved support for PDFs now.
• BRAT now allows users to "freeze" updates of a plugin to a particular version.
• Obsidian Chat View v1.1.0 allows users to customize headers a lot more.
• Hover Editor got a bunch of updates. We're up to 0.8.7 and it works on mobile, has a bunch of new commands (like converting a pane to a hover instance!), a new keyboard shortcut for the Quick Switcher, and more.
• The Another Quick Switcher plugin also has support for Hover Editor hotkeys.
• Memos 1.9.0 allows for commenting, better integration with Dataview and the Natural Language Dates plugin, and more.
• Advanced Slides improved callout support.
• Breadcrumbs is having some functionality removed to streamline the settings and make development easier.
• Privacy Glasses now supports Live Preview.
• Tasks now supports block quotes.
• The Auto Note Mover now supports filtering with regular expressions.

Betas

Note: these plugins have not yet been submitted for code review, and are being made available primarily for testing purposes.

• Omnisearch now has in-file search.
• BD Folder allows for notion-like databases based on folders. You can edit the cells directly in the tables, new columns, etc and it'll get saved in the relevant note. It even has filters!
• Development on the Dataview beta continues; there's improved task selection and counts in the headers.

For Developers

• Apparently the iOS dev tools plugin debugger plugin thing no longer works; does anybody have a usable fork or know more about it?
• The obsidian community lib v2.0.0 got a breaking change. If you use this, go find out more because I don't understand the nature of the app passing change well enough to explain it but the dev presumably does.
• If your theme is Obsidian Publish compatible, you can update the json file to add "publish": true to your theme info, and also add a publish.css file at the root of your repository, along with obsidian.css. In future versions the developers will (1) make it easy for Publish users to use the compatible themes for their sites, reducing confusion and loading unnecessary resources, and (2) make it easy for developers to test out their themes on a publish site. Here's more about why.
• You can now do applyCss and applyCssByLink to test out your CSS on Obsidian Publish sites, so that you don't actually need to own sites to test your publish.css. The first method takes a CSS string, you can use backtick (template strings) for multiline CSS. The second method takes a link and loads the CSS — Silver recommends using GitHub raw file URLs. Here's an example and more information in Discord.

Feature Requests

• Should the Strict Line Break setting affect callouts? Discuss!
• How can we improve filtering in the local graph?
• Improved tag handling would be nice, especially in terms of creation and deletion of tags.

Appearance

• Mado 11 by @hydescarf is a neat new theme inspired by the Windows 11 UI styling.
• LYT Mode now supports Alternative Checkboxes and Hover Editor, and has prettier highlights.
• Willemstad X v0.4.3 Nyhavn got some improvement to the Publish and print css, contrast improvements, and more.
• Liam shared a snippet to make the callouts in minimal more minimal.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a script for launching websites quickly from inside Obsidian.
• Here's a script for inserting fitbit activity into your notes.
• Mindstone is another free and open-source alternative to Obsidian Publish.

Guides

• Nicole van der Hoeven has a new video about task management in Obsidian.
• Here's a nice flowchart (Discord attachment) about when to bother creating a note about something.
• Here's a guide for how to use Dataview & QuickAdd to create a book database.
• Here's a guide to grounded field theory for non-academics; it's about analyzing data by letting the powerful and important insights in the data emerge through deep, iterative reading.
• Here's a guide for how to approach tag management.
• Here's a workaround for linking to callouts.
• A couple of new guides for Academics were added to the community knowledge base.
• Here's how to sync Windows/Debian and Android using a Synology NAS.

Discussions

• Here's a neat discussion in Discord about using Excalidraw to structure a multi-plot TV series project.
• Here's a neat discussion in Discord about how our memories work. Incidentally, my article about the value of sensemaking through fiction was sent out to financial supporters this week; it has a section on how stories help us remember things.
• Here's a discussion on Reddit about integrating Drafts (an iOS app) with Obsidian.

Showcases

• I livestreamed using my notes to write a nonfiction article about fungal blights. Behold my heavy usage of Hover Editor, and the sorts of situations that (normally) send me running to Discord with plugin feature requests.
• Here's a semantic organization system for hotkeys.
• Here's a task management system that works entirely in Obsidian.
• This choose your own adventure field guide to mental health hosted on Obsidian Publish got resurfaced this week.
• Here's a really comprehensive showcase of a med student's vault and workflow, with additional discussion from other folks in the medical field.
• Here's a completed todoist widget.

Ancillary Tools

• Here's a whole bunch of tools for turning web content into ebooks to make them easier to read on an eink device or tablet.
• Here's a discussion in Discord about how to manage Zotero references to webpages for non-academic uses.