🌠 Plugin Collaboration, Community Events, & Solving Mysteries

Create a mood tracker using custom checkboxes & learn how to use Obsidian like a pro writer.

Apr 09, 2022

The next community talk, "Easy automated testing for Obsidian plugin developers: find broken things before your users do...", is in an hour or so (9:30 AM EST). More details and a link to the Zoom meeting are in Discord.
Nicole van der Hoeven and Jeremy Valentine (@javalent is the developer of the "TTRPG suite" of plugins like dice roller, leaflet, admonitions, etc) are going to be live on Youtube in a couple of hours (1pm EST) to discuss his plugins & potentially some upcoming ones 👀

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.

Fleeting Notes Sync by @matthewwong525 this is a plugin to sync the Fleeting Notes browser extension with Obsidian
JiraIssue by @marc0l92 lets users track the progress of Atlassian Jira issues from your Obsidian notes.
AsciiDoc Blocks Plugin by @juracy renders asciidoc blocks (specifically tables)
Smort lets you easily edit, annotate and share articles; the plugin brings them into Obsidian.
Path Title by @jdeal adds the path (or optional replacement) to the filename title of each pane.

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.

Better CodeBlock by @stargrey adds titles and line numbers to Obsidian code block. Might be especially useful used in conjunction with...
Execute Code by @twibiral lets users run javascript code snippets from a code block. Python and Java are on the roadmap.
Daily notes opener by @reorx adds some nice styling and functionality to daily notes.
Obsidian Google Tasks by @YukiGasai lets users interact with your Google Tasks from inside Obsidian
Latex Suite by @artisticat1 is designed to make typing LaTeX faster through text expansion.
Doubleshift by @Qwyntex lets users open the command palette by pressing Double Shift like in IntelliJ
List Modified by @franciskafieh links all modified files meeting certain criteria to a daily note.

Updates

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

The Tasks plugin got a big update involving recurrence, file name handling, improved documentation, support for comments inside task blocks, and more. This is a really heartwarming example of community work; 12 (!) new people made their first contributions to the plugin for this update to happen :)
Custom Frames now has presets for Google Calendar & Todoist
the Quartz publish alternative option now supports CJK & RTL, LaTeX, and wikilinks.
Another Quick Switcher plugin added filename recent search.
The vimrc plugin now lets users define Vim commands with Javascript snippets.
Zotero Desktop Connector got a breaking change: users can now search for template files instead of having to type them in, but may need to re-set the templates.
Code Editor Shortcuts v1.7.0 now supports multiple cursors for most commands.
The Topic Linking plugin now has improved handling of larger PDF files, image handling and Zotero metadata (handled similarly to the bibnotes plugin, via a Zotero Better BibTex JSON export). The PDF output is very fiddly, and won't suit everyone's needs, but might be useful to people who are looking for Obsidian-searchable PDFs (among other things).

Betas

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

Auto Updated Date adds a front matter updated field to your notes that is updated to the current date and time whenever you save a note.
Smart Link is an experimental plugin that recommends notes that could be linked. It requires setting up dev lab server.
The Search on Internet plugin got forked — this experimental version lets you show results in hover popups, and has better hotkeys.

For Developers

@shabegom is looking for maintainer(s) for the block ref counter plugin.
@MSzturc, the developer of Advanced Slides is looking for a front-end developer to help with some UI improvements that have been requested by users.

Feature Requests

It would be neat if we could link to callout titles the same way we can link to section headings.

Appearance

Minimal 5.1.11 got a few more style settings, like the ability to disable sidebar relationship lines.
Shimmering Focus reorganized the Style Settings (and added a bunch as well, but this is a breaking change for your Style Settings so be careful when you update) as well as support for Hover Editor and more.
Here's CSS for inline block references that works for both NEW CM6 Live Preview and also Preview Mode for both CM5 (Legacy) and CM6 (New).

Ancillary Code

Here's an iOS-only Shortcut for making a bare bones rich-text PDF from an Obsidian note

Guides

Here's a neat guide for using custom checkboxes for a habit & mood tracker
This video presentation about how to generate insights with maps of content got resurfaced.
Here's a workflow for managing professional writing in Obsidian, from drafting manuscripts to managing writing projects, submissions, contracts, and seeing the big picture. It's pretty similar to mine, with the addition of linking contract information to individual stories.

Showcases

Here's a neat taxonomic trees graph inspired by this tree of knowledge writeup.
Here's a personal knowledge management workflow from a computer scientist.
Here's people sharing how they use Obsidian to solve mysteries in fiction books and it's really neat!
Conrad Gessner was using slips of paper to rearrange and make connections in the 1500s. Here's a book about it.

Discussions

Here's a lovely writeup from Sébastien Dubois about how their 25 years of personal knowledge management led them to Obsidian, and the key lessons they learned along the way, with an accompanying discussion on HackerNews.
Here was an article that made the rounds this week about how users are taking the internet back and tools like Obsidian are one way they're doing it. There are some nice quotes from @kepano, the developer of Minimal.
Here are some tips for copy and pasting from Obsidian to another program.
There was a Discord discussion about how to take notes using dataview, linked data/controlled vocabulary, and supercharged links.
Here's a method for using kanban boards for course outlining.

Ancillary Tools

If you're a Windows user who is tired of hearing about how amazing Hazel is for automatically doing stuff with your files... I've been trying out File Juggler. I've been making local copies of articles I want to archive using the MarkDownload extension. File Juggler automatically moves the .md files from my Downloads folder to my Unaltered folder Obsidian. It's not free, but it's a one-time purchase with a solid trial period.
Here's an alternative to Windows Explorer that got recommended. I'm told this guide makes it more accessible.

Money Stuff

Periodically, folks ask to send money to developers and moderators as a way to say thanks, but the developer or moderator is unable or unwilling to accept money directly. Today I stumbled across my note of charities that matter to @argentum. She's the volunteer moderator who handles publishing to the Hub, developed the MDNotes plugin for Zotero, as well as Obsidian's Hotkeys++ and Natural Language Dates plugins:

If you're in a giving mood, consider sending some money their way in her name 💚

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