🌠 Natural Language Search & a New CEO

Obsidian Updates

• Kepano is now the CEO of Obsidian. Here's the announcement on the forum, an ask-me-anything on the subreddit, and Kepano's personal twitter.

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.

• Audio Notes by @jjmaldonis  can create notes for audio files based on translations generated by Open AI Whisper.
• Metacopy & URL by @Lisandra-dev  makes it easier to copy the value of a frontmatter key and allows to create link from it using various settings.
• Adamantine Pick by @notlibrary  is an embeddable Pikchr diagrams renderer.
• S3 Image Uploader by @jvsteiner  is an ad-supported image uploader for Obsidian that allows you to self host images on AWS s3.
• Khoj is a fast, private, AI powered search assistant that understands natural language queries. Here's an accompany discussion on Reddit; if you'd like it to work on PDFs in your vault, consider telling the developer your use-case.

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.

• Perilous Writing by @sameersismail  encourages uses to write continuously—or lose all progress.
• Mixa by @mixasite  facilitates publishing your notes and blog posts with Mixa directly from Obsidian
• HK Code Block by @HeekangPark  improves the appearance of code blocks in Reading view.
• OpenWeather by @willasm  returns the current weather from OpenWeather in a configurable string format.
• Image Upload Toolkit by @addozhang  is for uploading local images embedded in markdown to remote store and export markdown for publishing to static site. Currently, it supports Imgur and Aliyun OSS.
• Material Symbols by @cberane  makes it easier to add Google's material symbols (outlined) to obsidian.
• AI Assistant by @nguyenvanduocit  uses OpenAI's API to assist users in their note-taking and writing process
• File Diff by @friebetill  shows the differences between two files.
• Optimize Canvas Connections by @felixchenier declutters a canvas by reconnecting notes using their nearest edges.

Updates

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

• Code Editor Shortcuts v1.13.0 now lets users go to first/last line, a specific line number, the next/previous word, or up/down a line.
• Linter v1.10.3 got a series of bugfixes.
• Obsidian Chat View now supports many more of Obsidian's markdown features, like internal links, relative links, image resizing, etc.
• Cardboard 0.7.2 now supports @due(none), added a Global Setting to disable using daily note dates as the due date for tasks, and more.
• Emoji Toolbar 0.4.0 no longer conflicts with Twitter Emoji.
• Another Quick Switcher 8.5.0 significantly improved previews, jump-to behavior, and added new commands to hotkeys in dialog.
• Github Publisher makes it easier to import/export settings safely, supports Github Enterprise, and fixed some bugs.
• Spaced Repetition 1.10.0 added new translations, improved flashcards, and more.
• Readwise {FN1} now allows you to export document-level notes on documents with highlights by using {{document_note}} in your export template. These include your personal notes as well as Ghostreader-generated summaries, q&a pairs, translations, etc.
• AudioNotes now makes it easier to take notes on YouTube videos.

For Developers

• Apropos of nothing, here's a casual reminder of Obsidian's policy for advertising in plugins.
• The Smart Random Note plugin is looking for a new maintainer.

Feature Requests

Appearance

• Nightingale by @frank0713 is a new colorful dark theme.
• Material Flat by @threethan is a new adaptation of Material You using Google's design standards.
• Cyber Glow 7.7.3 & 7.8.0 got a bunch of visual improvements.
• Sodalite now supports Obsidian 1.0's changed CSS.
• AnuPpuccin v1.3.0 added support for PDF exports and theme-dependent accent colors. The Style Settings page was also overhauled, and there were a variety of small fixes and improvements.

Ancillary Code

Guides

• Here's how Robert Martin uses GPT embeddings to build a smart search tool, along with the accompanying HackerNews discussion.
• Here's a nice guide to spacial thinking from the creator of Excalidraw.
• Bryan Jenks created a video about how to use Obsidian Canvas.
• Here's how to get Pandoc to respect markdown highlights and wikilinks.

Food for Thought

• Discord hosted a nice discussion of heuristics for how to name notes.
• Here's a handy Twitter thread from an academic writing coach about counter-intuitive productivity mistakes that plague academia.
• I really enjoyed this article about different kinds of notes that takes a much broader, more comprehensive view than I normally see.

Ancillary Tools

• Obsidian CLI is now available on Homebrew and via direct install from Github.
• Tp-Note makes it easier to save clipboard content as a note file and can also sync metadata and filenames. It's intended to facilitate minimalistic notetaking.
• Here's how to export notes from Google Keep to plain text. Here's an export tool for highlights from Apple Books. Here's one for Apple Notes.

Housekeeping

• {FN1} In the interest of disclosure for folks who don't know, I do work part-time for Readwise as their quality assurance & export integration specialist.