🌠 Obsidian October Winners & AI Integrations
A guide for using Readwise with Obsidian, a demo vault for computer engineering students, & the first Canvas plugins.
In The Community
Here's a list of all 84 entrants for Obsidian October, but the winners were:
- New Plugin: Obsidian Projects by Marcus Olsson
- New Plugin Student Pick: make.md by JP
- New Theme: Origami by kneecaps
- Plugin Update: Obsidian-OCR by Jonas Mohr
- Theme Update: Shimmering Focus Rewrite for Obsidian 1.0 by pseudometa
- Written Content: The Konik Method for Making Useful Notes by me 😊
- Written Content Student Pick: How to Boost Your Productivity for Scientific Research Using Obsidian by Leonardo Castorina
- Video: Obsidian Onboarding by Danny Hatcher
- Video Student Pick: How I Write Conceptual Lecture Notes in Obsidian by Aidan Helfant
- Demo Vault: Obsidian for Biblical & Theological Studies by Limezy
- Demo Vault Student Pick: MISS W by Kinmury (for Computer Engineers).
Click through to check out the runners up! There was a lot of fantastic content created in October.
Obsidian Updates
- v1.1.3 had a bunch of Canvas improvements, and Live Preview mode should no longer flash with unstyled text while scrolling big documents.
- v1.1.4 also improved Canvas, but the main thing is that you can now "Group" things on your Canvas; they work a bit like placemats.
- v1.1.5 also improved Canvas (are you sensing a theme), with more options and better rendering when zoomed out.
- v1.1.6 also improved Canvas, making it easier to export the canvas as an image.
Plugin News
New in Community Plugins
These plugins went through code review and are now available in Obsidian's plugin list. For the full list, check out the plugin stats page.
- SamePage by
@dvargas92495
is the Obsidian client into the inter-TFT-protocol by David Vargas. - Image Layouts by
@vertis
adds beautiful image layouts to your notes. - BPMN Plugin by
@joleaf
enables viewing/editing BPMN diagrams using bpmn-js. - Daily Notes Editor by
@Quorafind
makes it easier to edit a bunch of daily notes in one page, inline. - Smart Links by
@kemayo
allows users to define custom link formats. - Auto Glossary by
@ennioitaliano
automatically create a file with an index and/or glossary. - Toggle Meta Yaml by
@hua03
makes it easier to toggle meta yaml. - Code Preview by
@zjhcn
lets users render code in a file by creating apreview
code block and putting the file path inside, i.e.path: hello.js
- Obsidian asciimath by
@widcardw
adds asciimath support. - Achievements by
@Zachatoo
makes it easier to gamify habit building. - Markdown to Jira Converter by
@muckmuck96
is a markdown to jira markup (and vice versa) converter. - New Bullet With Time by
@Quorafind
allows you to auto add current time to new bullet line. - Double Click Tab by
@Quorafind
modifies the default behavior when you double click on the tab title, like close tab. - Hidden Folder by
@ptrsvltns
lets users use regular expressions to hide certain folders. - AWS DynamoDb For Obsidian by
@leenattress
lets users query AWS DynamoDb and render tables inside documents.
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.
- Workona To Obsidian by
@Holmes555
lets users import Workona resources through generated JSON file. - Project Garden by
@bgoosman
makes it easier to see all your projects in one place. - FuzzyTag by
@adriandersen
allows users to fuzzy match autocomplete tags in Frontmatter - Tab Switcher by
@Quorafind
lets users search currently open tabs. - Paper Import by
@zimmerrol
allows automatic import from arXiv and Openreview. - DMN Plugin by
@joleaf
enables viewing DMNs using dmn-js. - Audio Notes by
@jjmaldonis
makes it easier to create notes for audio files based on translations generated by Open AI Whisper. - Obsidian Mermaid by
@dartungar
is an improved Mermaid.js experience for Obsidian, and provides visual toolbar with common elements & more. - Translate by
@Fevol
lets users translate text with lots of different APIs. - Disable plugins temporarily by
@nguyenvanduocit
makes it easier to temporarily disable all plugins. - Checklist Reset by
@lhansford
adds a command to reset the state of any checklists in a document. - evergreen by
@zk4
improves stacked tabs by jumping to an already opened tab if you try to open it again. - Console Markdown Plugin by
@dellermann
renders console commands and their output. - Base Tag Renderer by
@darrenkuro
renders the basename of tags in preview mode. - Table Code Block by
@ptrsvltns
makes interacting with tables in Obsidian a little nicer. - GPT-3 Notes by
@micahke
lets users create notes using OpenAI's GPT-3 language model. - Obsidian Share by
@nguyenvanduocit
generates beautiful gradient images from text that can be shared on social media. - Paste As Html by
@maotong06
lets users paste as html, keeping the original css style. - File Color by
@ecustic
makes it easier to set colors on folders and files in the file tree. - Canvas Presentation by
@Quorafind
makes it easier to display cards based on sequence. - Open Gate by
@nguyenvanduocit
makes it easier to embed websites that can't be iframed, like Google Translate. - Historical Query by
@janschlatter
makes it easier to search and insert biographical data from deutsche-biographie.de - Toggle Case by
@MatthewAlner
makes it easier to toggle betweenlowercase
UPPERCASE
andTitle Case
, similar to Text Format. - AI Images by
@microtower00
integrates the generation of AI images inside of your Obsidian interface using OpenAI API keys. - Read Later by
@Canna71
makes it esaier to sync web pages to markdown and integrate with read-it-later apps like Pocket and Instapaper by fetching bookmarks from the services and storing them as markdown notes. - Set In Obsidian by
@sandorex
helps with time planning.
Updates
If you want a comprehensive list of what plugins updated this week, check out this plugin updates index by Ganessh Kumar.
- Self-hosted Livesync 0.17.2 can now merge conflicted documents automatically.
- Digital Garden 2.26.0 added support for enabling a table of content in the right sidebar.
- Obsidian Columns 1.4.0 added new callout syntax, which uses plain CSS to create columns. This allows all native obsidian markdown editor features to be available when creating columns.
- Text Generator 0.1.18 added template models.
- Quick Switcher++ 2.3.5 added a new setting to enable accessing the different modes of the switcher from a ribbon icon button.
- Spaced Repetition 1.9.0 added backwards navigation of cards, curly brackets as an option for cloze fields, a new setting to collapse and expand subdecks, and more.
- Tasks 1.20.0 added support for tasks in numbered lists and a new 'priority is not' filter option.
- Readwise Mirror 1.3.0 lets users sort highlights by location and filter discarded highlights.
- Linter 1.9.1 improved header increment support.
- Database Folder 3.0.1 got a bunch of experimental new options involving empty cells.
Betas
Note: these plugins have not yet been submitted for code review, and are being made available primarily for testing purposes.
- Canvas MindMap makes it easier to use Obsidian Canvas as a mindmap, with
enter
letting users create a new "brother" node andtab
creating a "child" node.
For Developers
- QuickAdd 0.8.0 now has a public API.
- The Vimrc plugin developer is looking for a new maintainer for the plugin.
Appearance
@stēla
shared a CSS snippet to make it easier to see connections inside blocks on the Canvas.- Apatheia by
@AmadeusWM
is a new theme inspired by Things that looks like a lot of fun on Macs. - Border by
@Akifyss
is a new theme with new icons and illustrations. - Typora-Vue by
@ZekunC
is a new theme inspired by the Vue document style. - Solarized by
@harmtemolder
reduces brightness contrast but, unlike many low contrast color schemes, retains contrasting hues.
Ancillary Code
- Here is a script to help export data from Heptabase and get it into an Obsidian canvas.
Guides
- Here's how John Mavrick uses Readwise and Obsidian to efficiently take notes.
- Here's how to navigate a Johnny decimal vault better with the quick switcher(s) and specifically the relevance of prefix search.
- Here's a method for how to use Obsidian for personal contact relationship management via
@jwalberg
in Discord. @Damikiller37
in Discord shared a great getting started guide to making a theme.
Discussions
@oldtowneast@pkm.social
did a neat reaction thread to the December 3 edition of the Obsidian Roundup that tests out and evaluates some of the new plugins mentioned.- Here's a lengthy Reddit thread about whether the goal of personal knowledge management is flawed.
Showcases
- Leah Ferguson's OmniFocus/Obsidian workflow video is now available and explains how she integrates task management and apple software with Obsidian.
- Here's how to use the new Canvas plugin to calculate inbreeding coefficients for sheep. There were also a ton of incredible canvases showcased in the new showcase-canvas channel in Discord.
- Here's a highly opinionated iOS-based sample vault that is practical-minded and extremely detailed in explanation.
- Here's a daily notes template via Discord.
Ancillary Tools
- Readwise Reader, a read it later app that works with youtube videos, has GPT-3 integrations to summarize & translate texts, and sends all of your highlights and annotations to Obsidian, entered public beta this week. Here's the Product Hunt page, and here's the Twitter launch announcement.
Housekeeping
- Reminder: I am taking Christmas and New Year's off. I have a lot of things to catch up on, and I'm going to be out of town for a big chunk of the holiday season. See y'all in January!
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).
🌠 Recipe importing & Linting improvements
New themes, productivity Shortcuts for mac, and systems for pairing digital & analogue.
🌠 Conference Videos, Dendron support, & Improved Reference Counting
Showcasing teachers, authors, medical students, people impacted by LLMs, gardeners, and mathematicians.
🌠 PDF improvements & More AI Options
Check out some great guides on how to create folder and tag systems, and how to use the Strange New Worlds & bookmarks plugin!