🌠 Improved Content Importation & Search

Many plugins got added to the community store & there were a bunch of discussions about Obsidian for academic uses.

In The Community

• Here's an open-source obsidian vault (via obsidian git and github) for maintaining notes on mathematical physics, physics and mathematics. It is accepting contributions.

• An android developer is looking for ideas on what mobile functionality the community would like to have on hand with the Obsidian app, more quickly?

Obsidian Updates

• Insider v0.14.7 has a bunch of improvements for Obsidian Publish and Sync, including an improved setup guide for Sync, a new selector for light/dark mode on Publish, and more.

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.

• Omnisearch by @scambier is the new and improved search.

• Calibre by @caronchen lets users access their calibre libraries and read books directly in Obsidian.

• Obsidian Columns by @tnichols217 lets users create columns more easily.

• Drag-n-Drop for blocks by @artem-barmin Allows for moving/copying/creating embeds for blocks with drag-n-drop just like Logseq or Roam.

• Notion-Like Tables by @trey-wallis lets users create markdown tables using an interface similar to that found in Notion.

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.

• Pandoc Reference List by @mgmeyers displays a formatted reference in the sidebar for each pandoc citekey present in the current document.

• Release Timeline by @cakechaser requites Dataview, but lets users create "yes/no" style visuals like Wikipedia's release timelines.

• Filename Emoji Remover by @YTolun automatically removes emojis from filenames; this is really handy for sanitizing Readwise imports for Dropbox syncing. I filed an issue suggesting it be expanded out for other filename sanitization 👀

• Paste image Png to Jpeg by @musug compresses and renames screenshots when you paste them into Obsidian.

• Folder Index by @turulix will automatically generate a table of contents for the current folder.

• AutoMOC by @dalcantara7 looks for missing linked mentions to the current note and imports them into the current note.

Updates

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

• Collapse All v1.5.1 collapses attachment folders by default, and adds some new commands to the right click menu.

• Task Collector 0.7.8 now allows users to mark tasks in callouts and preserve strict line-ending spaces.

• Zotero Desktop Connector v2.0.0 simplifies import templates and has new documentation.

• Code Editor Shortcuts v1.8.0 now allows users to select all (or just next) occurrences of the current selection.

• Advanced Slides 1.9.0 now has template support and improved documentation.

• The JSON/CSV importer now has support for handlebars-helpers, select more than one source data file, and create note names according to JSON fields.

• Hover Editor added a new setting to enable triggering Hover Editor when hovering over rendered embeds

Betas

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

• Calibre Importer lets you read your Calibre books directly in Obsidian and allows you to import your book metadata and highlights from Calibre.

For Developers

• Theme developers, please check out this proposal for creating an easier way to keep your information up to date in the community hub.

Feature Requests

• Visually distinguish stared notes in graph view.

• AI driven autocomplete a la the gmail editor.

Appearance

• AbsoluteGruv by @kkYrusobad is new, if you like the Gruvbox palette, check it out.

• Shimmering Focus differentiates between link types more clearly, prettier buttons, and got a bunch of other new features.

• Prism v2.0.0 has 8 new color schemes, native styling for callouts, and other improvements but you must install style settings (and restart) for it to work.

Guides

• Here's a workflow for connecting a digital notebook with an analog one, explained and expanded on in Discord.

• Here's a nice quick video guide on using Obsidian for Dungeons & Dragons, along with the discussion on Reddit.

• Here's a new guide for syncing Readwise exports to Obsidian.

• Here's a task management system writeup.

• Here's a new way to use Alfred Pandoc Suite with Obsidian to export PDF with citation and bibliographies.

Discussions

• Here are some tips for using Dataview to make Eisenhower matricies.

• Here are 6 months of PhD work as a timelapsed graph. There's also a nice associated discussion on Reddit.

• Several people commented on an article about how someone used Obsidian for their PhD.

• Here's a discussion of different daily notes workflows for academics.

• Here's a discussion comparing flashcard plugin options.

• Here's a nice discussion about how people use Obsidian mobile.

• This one is a nice compilation of clever tricks for using Obsidian.

• Here's a nice writeup and accompanying discussion about how to keep things simple with Obsidian so it doesn't feel too complicated.

• Here's a nice discussion with advice about how to create a maintainable second brain.

Ancillary Tools

• The social highlighting tool Glasp now supports one-click exports to Obsidian.

• The Snipd Podcast Player Integration now allows users to listen to exported highlights directly from Obsidian, since all exported snips will now also include an embedded player.

Housekeeping

I wrote an article about my qualifications to give advice, mostly to reassure myself but also as a reference to help people decide whether I'm worth listening to when I talk about things like how I use folders vs. tags or the value of the graph view. There's also some actual advice tucked in there you might find useful, mostly about tradeoffs between efficiency & thoroughness and the importance of being willing to mess up.