🌠 Joke plugins, hands-free notes, & table improvements

In The Community

• This year's April Fools joke was Obsidian's first assistant - Gemmy, the Obsidian Unhelper. Not sure if an AI assistant is going to be helpful in your workflow? Don't worry, they've eliminated the guesswork for you because Gemmy is 100% going to be unhelpful. Gemmy seeks validation by randomly saying things every now and then, and pops out to motivate you when you have stopped typing for long enough. There are also several complementary new emojis in the Obsidian Discord.
• Other fun April Fools jokes include the M.U.M.M.Y method for organizing a personal knowledge base and the Minimalister CSS snippet to make all problems with your complex writing fade right away.
• The mobile section of the forum is now closed as a bit of spring cleaning; relevant posts have been relocated to other sections like Feature Requests, Bug Reports, and Help.

Obsidian Updates

• Insider v1.2.1 & v1.2.2 improved the functionality for managing included and excluding folders, the bookmarks plugin, and added a command to close tabs except the selected one. There were also several bugfixes and other improvements.

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.

• Page Properties by @necauqua renders page properties similar to Logseq
• Avatar by @froehlichA displays an avatar image in your notes.
• Floating Search by @Quorafind lets users use search view in modal.
• Jelly Snippets by @rabirabirara makes it easier to replace text after typing a snippet on some trigger or command, a la espanso.

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.

• Tab Complete by @adaviloper facilitates tab-completing the file paths when creating new files.
• Loom by @cosmicoptima integrates Loom with Obsidian.
• Bulk open selected links by @autohub7 allows users to easily open all selected links in edit mode.
• File Order by @lukasbach facilitates using number-prefixes in your file names to define a custom order, and drag-and-drop the files to update that order
• Frontmatter Alias Display by @muhammadv-i shows front-matter aliases as display names in the File Explorer.
• Fuzzy Chinese Pinyin by @lazyloong facilitates fuzzy search using Chinese Pinyin.
• Whisper by @nikdanilov facilitates a hands-free note-taking with Whisper
• Get Stock Information by @mikejongbloet takes a stock symbol and returns a callout block with the latest stock information.
• Counter by @rmutt92 is a counter for metadata in YAML frontmatter.
• Character Insertion by @TakamiChie makes it easier to insert a specified symbol under the cursor
• GPT-LiteInquirer by @ittuann is a chatGPT plugin that facilitates drafting content without interrupting your creative flow.
• Image OCR by @kaffarell runs OCR on images and pastes the result in descriptions.
• Google Keep Import by @daledesilva lets users import Google Keep backup json files and their attachments, along with some other files.
• Game Search by @CMorooney helps you find games and create notes.
• Crossbow by @shoedler makes it easier to find possible backlinks in your notes.

Updates

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

• BRAT improved support for beta-testing themes.
• ChatGPT-MD has improved language support, added the ability to comment out certain blocks, a "clear" command, and more.
• Notion-Like Tables got a big overhaul, and loads and saves to JSON (like Obsidian Canvas), which means this update is not backwards-compatible. You can now drag and drop columns, add multiple lines of text using shift+enter, and more.
• Linter v1.11.0 added language support and fixed a bunch of bugs.
• QuickAdd v.0.19.2 added a bunch of improvements for the Capture functionality.
• Task Archiver added new settings for destination paths, replacing, and appending.
• The Cycle-Through-Panes plugin now supports holding the CTRL key like in a browser.

Appearance

• The Tasks plugin now supports advanced styling.
• The modular css layout hack got some improvements; float callouts now work better, and you no longer need to have Contextual Typography installed.
• Prism added styling support for the Bookmarks plugin, and got some bugfixes.
• The easy multi-column notes snippet added support for multi-column embeds and callouts.

Showcases

• Here's a nice showcase of using Templater and the Make.md plugin to handle metadata with a nifty graphical user interface.
• Mike Shea and Nicole van der Hoeven got together to compare their tabletop game running setups, using Notion vs. Obsidian.
• Here's a method for taking notes about people, including templates and heuristics on when it's a good idea to do so, along with an accompanying discussion on Mastodon that I find is much easier to read using the https://phanpy.social/ app.
• Here's a review of the new core Bookmarks plugin.
• Here's how ChatGPT can be used to create an Obsidian canvas.
• Did you know you can drag and drop by headings using the Outline plugin?
• Here's a daily notes template using callouts.