🌠 Better Citations Workflows & Native Callout Boxes

The hover editor plugin got secondary support from other plugins, there's a new option for dynamic indexes, & a guide for browser-based Obsidian.

Mar 19, 2022

Matthew Meyers, the developer of Style Settings, Smart Typography, Kanban, Indentation Guides, Contextual Typography, and the California Coast theme — oh, and the new Zotero Connector (!) plugin — is currently studying to be a therapist and is looking for part time & contract-based work. If you have any front end web development work you need done, please reach out. Also, if you enjoy his plugins, this is one of those times when money can really make a big difference to one of our wonderful plugin devs, so consider donating to his ko-fi.

Obsidian Updates

Obsidian Mobile is at parity with code and removed the "open link" popover in Live Preview. You can now click on links directly to open them. Press and hold to edit the link.

Obsidian Markdown now allows you to create callout blocks (sometimes called “admonitions”). Callouts are written as a blockquote, inspired by the “alert” syntax from Microsoft Docs. This allows callout boxes to be supportive natively on Obsidian Publish. (this sherlocked Admonitions by @javalent congrats on having one less thing to maintain!)
Indentation guides (sometimes known as relationship lines) are now available in Live Preview and Reading view. (this sherlocked Relationship Lines by mgmeyers congrats on having one less thing to maintain!)
Tasks with checkmark characters other than x will now no longer have the strikethrough formatting applied.
There's also an update to fix the <C-w> <key> vim binding not working.

As of Insider 0.14.1, Live Preview now supports basic markdown tables previewing — thank you @melvin (the Willemstad developer) for pioneering this method. 0.14.2 brought support for starred files supporting hover page previews.

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.

Hover Editor by @nothingislost transforms the Page Preview hover popover into a fully working editor instance — which is enabling people to meaningfully work off the graph view, which is really cool. A bunch of other plugin developers have been working hard to support this functionality, including Pane Relief and Quick Explorer. I strongly recommend reading their release notes if you're using Hover Editor.
Etherpad by @egradman allows users to set up a server as a lightweight collaboration tool / live editor for documents in your vault. It seems like a middle ground between pushing your whole vault to git and copy-pasting everything into hack.md or google documents.
Screwdriver by @vrtmrz is a utility to move files into and out of your vault, which is handy on iOS where you can't otherwise access things in hidden (dot) folders.
Lapel by @liamcain adds a marker for headings in the gutter. There's also a menu for quickly switching the heading level.
Daily Notes Viewer by @Johnson0907 gives you a scrollable daily notes interface à la Roam Research.
Waypoint by @IdreesInc lets users easily generate dynamic MOCs in your folder notes. Enables folders to show up in the graph view.
Obsidian matrix by @NastyGamer is intended for creating LaTeX matricies more easily.
Zotero Desktop Connector by @mgmeyers lets users insert citations, bibliographies, and notes directly from Zotero desktop. There are plans to support extracting annotations from PDFs (including image annotations) but it's already a great bridge for creating Pandoc-friendly citations. Here's an interesting forum discussion about how to use the new Zotero beta, by the way, and here's one discussing Zotero best practices.
Telegraph Publish by @reorx allows users to easily publish to Telegraph, an anonymous blogging platform.
Navigate Cursor History by @heycalmdown remembers the recent 50 cursor positions history and allows you to jump to them back and forth like VSCode.

Updates

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

The maker of Obsidian Markmind created a way to export the interactive tables from the mindmapping tool into extended table markdown, and the tables are really slick.
Sortable introduced support for sorting Dataview tables in Live Preview.
Remotely-save 0.3.5 can bypass CORS issues, which is handy for s3 and webdav. It supports Backblaze B2, TeraCLOUD.jp, and SHOULD support owncloud/nextcloud, NAS webdav, etc.
Users of Obsidian Leaflet should update to v5.0.0 if your real-world maps are suddenly rendering blank; an upstream dependency changed.
The jump to link plugin now supports both CM6 and LivePreview; users of the "quick jump plugin" via BRAT should switch.
icon shortcode v0.9.0 lets you use icon shortcodes in css variables: --callout-icon lets you specify custom icons for callouts
Charts lets users link Tables to Charts.
Flexible Pomo shows notes with active tasks now.

Admonitions

Since Admonitions got sherlocked it also got overhauled; due to conflicts it no longer supports Microsoft's callout syntax.
There's a new button available in settings that will automatically convert your existing MSDoc Syntax to the new callout syntax. This will modify your notes. Please make backups before using.
Admonitions can be used to quickly and easily create custom callout types. There is also the ability to export your custom types as valid CSS, or have the plugin maintain a CSS snippet for you.
Admonitions now offers several quality-of-life features for callouts, including an editor suggester as you create callouts, a helpful Insert Callout command, and the ability to register Insert Callout commands for your custom types.
You can also use Admonitions to set default titles and default collapse states for your callouts, but that won't work on Publish.

Betas

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

Version History Diff can display diffs of both the Sync and the File Recovery version history for the currently active file.

For Developers

Zotero Desktop Connector by @mgmeyers is looking for co-maintainers. We're trying to consolidate some of the citations-related and zotero-related plugins under one banner to make things easier on the community, so if that project is useful to you (even if you aren't a dev!) please join us in the Citations plugin(s) collaboration thread in the Academia channel on Discord, or the Zotero Desktop Connector github repository.
As of v.0.14.0, Plugin inline sourcemaps are now stripped for performance unless the debug startup time option is enabled.
To style the new core relationship lines, use the CSS class cm-indent and cm-active-indent.

Feature Requests

Here's a request to quickly search a folder with a right-click command instead of having to use the path: stuff in the search bar.

Appearance

Minimal has support for data task icons now in checklists (i.e. - [!] important), including an editable snippet.
Spectrum is up to 1.1.5 and got a bunch of bugfixes and support for Style Settings and plugins like Charts.
Ebullientworks 0.3.23 now supports native indentation guides and made the Admonitions and callout boxes match stylistically.
Primary's modals are now responsive to screen size.
Here's a snippet for highlighting date/timestamps.

Ancillary Code

Here's a neat setup to help find orphan files a home.
The obsidian to mkdocs python script was updated to support the new callout syntax.
Supercharged Citation Picker is an Alfred Workflow for using a BibTeX file (.bib) that works with page numbers, multiple citations, smart search for citekeys, authors, titles, etc. It's very fast and easy to install... if you're a mac user with Alfred.
The Templater and Various Complements plugins combined let users have autocompletion of citations while typing.

Guides

Here's how to run Obsidian in a docker container for remote/browser access, and here's the discussion on Reddit that includes some discussion about how to do it with Mac and NAS.
Here's a comparison of Interstitial Journaling and Categorical Journaling as part of a beginner's guide to journaling in your daily note video on Youtube. Pamela also has a nice one on tagging conventions.
Here's a guide on how to use Obsidian to manage craft projects, like knitting. This came after extensive discussion in the Discord about how to use Obsidian for yarn and knitting related projects.
Here's a really thought-provoking guide about how to weave a web of knowledge that threads connections and heavily utilizes the local graph view and plugins like Breadcrumbs to navigate a vault.
Here's a really interesting guide about how to manage the open-source ecosystem with a lot of thought-provoking points about business models, relationships, boundaries, and goal setting. I'm including it here because I think it's relevant to our developer community, but I honestly think anyone wanting to spend or make money from the internet should read it.
Here's a discussion about how to get your "note to yourself" from yesterday into today's daily note, and here's the template.

Showcases

I made a chart of my tech stack so I could get a better grip on some pieces of my writing process. It's currently my most popular top-level tweet ever, so I figured I'd share it here.
Somebody figured out how to run Obsidian on a Steam Deck (a handheld gaming pc).
Here's a graph shaped like a chicken that got 200 upvotes and an award on Reddit.

Ancillary Tools

Here's a new markdown-backed highlights and annotations tool for articles in your browser that came out this week. I haven't had time to mess with it much, but according to the discussion on HackerNews works similar to hypothes.is except you don't need to download an extension and make an account, it strips out ads, and you can edit the article content directly using Markdown. You can also do more customizations.
Here's a neat project that lets you serve local HTML files to an eink reader with a pleasant UI for kindles. This HackerNews discussion also discusses workarounds for getting your content onto kindles readably.
Here's a terminal based markdown reader.

Housekeeping

My article about how to avoid feeling guilty about a big pile of unfinished articles to read (or, it must be said, write) just went live to Obsidian Roundup supporters. Embrace having a filtered list of high-quality reading available when you need it ;)

Up on the third Thursday of next month is "Sensemaking through Fiction" aka why storytelling is a deeply underutilized method for gaining & integrating knowledge, as well as conveying information (and wisdom) to an audience.

Obsidian Iceberg

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