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🌠 "Bionic Reading," Improved Popout Windows, & Better Databases

Showcases from game developers, roleplaying game players, and daily note takers. Plus a guide for when to use tags, folders and links.

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.

In The Community

  • This is your periodic reminder that Obsidian Community Talks are community organized, not "officially sponsored events" or anything, and basically anyone is welcome to propose or host one. If you're interested, reach out and I'll help you get in touch with the relevant people.

Obsidian Updates

  • Insider v0.15.3 brings a bunch of great new features for dragging panes between pop-out windows as well as some awesome improvements to Obsidian Sync, namely that the little button at the bottom of the screen lets you bring up a menu, so you don't need to go into settings to check on the sync log or pause things. They also fixed a bunch of hotkey stuff.

Plugin News

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 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.

Updates

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

  • ExcaliBrain, Supercharged Links, Sliding Panes, and Kanban now have improved support for Obsidian 0.15.2 Popout Windows. Pane Relief added multi-window history support.
  • The Jump to Link plugin now also has a lightspeed command, which is originally a neovim plugin. It works with Obsidian 0.15.x versions and above.
  • The Another Quick Switcher plugin now lets users search by links and has a search delay, as well as recommended recent search command and modals to open and create in a new window (for those on the new Insider)
  • Local Quotes 1.6.0 now has a button to refresh quote blocks immediately, a new search strategy for weighted random, and the ability to use plain text without formatting.
  • Omnisearch got some search index improvements, improved tag search, added an API, and more.
  • Notion-Like Tables v4 got a big update; it renders all tables as notion-like by default (tho you can opt out), there were a bunch of bug fixes, and now there's internal id management which should make things cleaner.
  • Obsidian Tasks SQL Powered 2.5.0 is now updated with all the new Tasks features, along with some options for creation dates. There was also an update to the documentation.
  • Database Folder now lets users use dataview queries as sources, there's templates for new rows, you can hide columns with configs, render images, use tags as sources, and more.

For Developers

  • The release notes for 0.15.3 have a bunch of new enhancements for DOM elements and UI elements, as well as some new workspace events, changes, and deprecated some menu stuff.
  • The functionality that allows for editing metadata fields using Supercharged Links is looking for a new home. There are more details in Discord if you're interested in helping out with this.
  • If anyone knows how to update the Obsidian Vale client for Live Preview, it would be appreciated.

Feature Requests

Appearance

Showcases

Guides

Discussions

Ancillary Tools

  • Here's a fast, free quick capture app for iOS.
  • It looks like gitjournal got some updates, which is good to hear. It's a git-backed markdown editor for mobiles. This is the app a lot of folks used before Obsidian got a mobile version.
  • Glasp (a social highlighting app) released a new feature to display a reading list of articles on Obsidian, using iframes. Here's a tutorial and a video.
  • Apparently some folks who use analog zettelkastens call them antinets. The subreddit community seems a bit dogmatic but I found skimming it to be interesting.

Housekeeping

It's a holiday weekend in the States and I'm going to be on vacation until Monday night. I'll have minimal access to internet, and uncharacteristically I have a stack of emails from this week I haven't had a chance to reply to. I'll try to catch up by the end of next week, but if you try to reach out and I don't reply with my usual speed, that's why 😅

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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