🌠 Obsidian Shirts, Grouped Tasks & 1-min Guides

Obsidian Updates

• You can now buy Obsidian merchandise, mostly hoodies and t-shirts so far, but I've been hearing a lot of requests for stickers. You can use the code SHIPSFREE until August 31, to get worldwide free shipping when you spend over US$100.

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.

• Document Editing Shortcuts by @happy-grizzly  makes it easier to remap document editing shortcuts, which allows users to use the mouse less.
• PodNotes by @chhoumann  helps users write notes on podcasts.
• Dynamic Background by @samuelsong70  is for adding dynamic background effects to the Obsidian editor, like floating stars behind your text.
• Obsidian-Count-Down by @hamolicious  adds a count down to selected dates for easier timing and tracking of TODOs or events.
• Open Related Url by @dpickett  opens URLs found in a note's YAML frontmatter
• Gitlab Issues by @benr77  makes it easier to import issues from Gitlab into Obsidian.

Updates

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

• Hover Editor 0.11.3 makes hover editors less grabby for focus with Obsidian 0.15.6+'s API changes.
• Tasks 1.11.0 supports a bunch of new grouping options.
• Fleeting Notes Sync 0.3.0 lets users enable end-to-end encryption between the Obsidian plugin and Fleeting Notes.
• Pane Relief's Focus Lock feature can now prevent the "reveal in file explorer" command from stealing focus, so if you're using the Reveal Active File plugin, you can keep it from constantly grabbing the keyboard away from you. There's also a new Close pane and go to adjacent command.
• Quick Explorer now shortens the Obsidian 0.15.6+ title text and moves it to the right, so that it doesn't clash. It also added keyboard commands to sort through numerically sorted notes.
• Spaced Repetition v1.8.0 supports "ogg" as supported audio file formats, customizable review buttons (which I am very excited about!), and some new translations.
• Database folder 2.0.0 got a bunch of performance improvements, the ability to adjust the size of each column, and settings now save after closing the database.
• Hotkey Helper lets users define a hotkey for something right from the command palette by jumping to the hotkey editing screen for the item, which is very handy. It also adds keyboard commands to let you jump right to a plugin's settings or hotkeys
• Zotero Integration now supports a "template" citation format. This allows you to build templates to insert any data you want from Zotero into the current note in obsidian.

Betas

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

• Obsidian Translate 1.2.0 offers fully local & offline text translation and language detection.
• Here's a method for defining Anki cards inside Obsidian using JSON. It's highly opinionated and mostly exists because the developer is able to maintain this one but not the more complex ones that already exist.

For Developers

• Marcus published new docs for building editor extensions.

Feature Requests

• Have you noticed that when you follow a link to a heading, the heading itself isn't loaded into the view? Share your opinion about this behavior on the forum if you have one.

Appearance

• Here's a discussion on Twitter about what people would like to see out of the upcoming default theme.
• Silence by @luke-rmaki is a new dark theme  using the Fira Code font and some nice blues and teals.
• Sanctum for Obsidian v0.15.8 improved keyboard navigation, added a placeholder icon for incomplete tasks: - [/], got some bug fixes, and updated callouts to support pseudo-admonitions.
• ITS Theme added background images to workspaces, Word document style display, and more alignment options for headings.

Ancillary Code

• Here's how to get inline block references (plus some nice visuals of what that means).

Guides

• In Discord, one of the moderators shared a guide to getting the most out of the Obsidian community with some great links on how to search various platforms for information.
• Here's a detailed guide for how to use Obsidian as a shopping list and recipe manager because, reminder: not all notes are oriented around pure knowledge and learning about the world, heh.
• Here's a one minute guide to building connections in Obsidian.
• Here are some questions to ask when analyzing a resource shared in Discord, based off of How to Read a Book Revised and Updated Edition by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler.
• Here's a comprehensive guide to using the daily notes plugin.
• Here's a guide to using Obsidian for PhD research in artificial intelligence.

Discussions

• There was a nice discussion about metaphors for collaborative innovation and sharing knowledge and how they relate to things like learning in public.
• This timely discussion about the value of paying attention to aesthetics aligns pretty well with the pretty vs practical: shortcuts for finding the middle ground article I wrote as a "thank you" for financial supporters of the roundup; I recommend checking it out if you've ever felt bad (or felt like people think you should feel bad) for caring about how things look.
• Reddit had some great advice about which plugins are useful for STEM students.
• There was a nice discussion about what to do if you're feeling overwhelmed, which linked to another great discussion about simple, effective Obsidian workflows. Nick Milo's Obsidian for Beginners series also got referenced as a good resource for good but simple ways to leverage Obsidian.
• There was a lengthy discussion about how, when, and why to paraphrase and attribute sources in Discord.

Showcases

• @daviddelven shared a great graphic of their workflow as an IT Consultant, teacher, and Architectural & Engineering technician. It's in Discord.
• Here's how to set up a habit tracker using the Database Folder plugin.
• Here's a nice example of using dataview variables to drive Obsidian charts.
• Here's an example of a tv show / series note that was shared in Discord.
• Here's @nvanderhoeven showcasing how she prepares to run a game of dungeons & dragons; it seems very in-depth.

Ancillary Tools

• Smort (a markdown-based app to easily edit, share, and save articles) now supports ArXiv articles and allows for permanent saving. It has an Obsidian plugin.

Housekeeping

• The Roundup now has over 6,000 members 🤯 I hope you all find it useful 💚 We're officially moved over to the new Ghost version and I think everything is stable, but let me know if you run into any issues, especially if you're one of the folks who tends to read the web version and not get the emails.