🌠 PDF Indexing & Live Preview Table Edits

Tips on time blocking, a dashboard for dataview queries, & management tools for Magic: The Gathering.

In The Community

Note: a bunch of great things happen in Discord every week, but the links require you to be logged in to the community server and generally launch in the browser version of Discord unless you paste them into your app directly. Sorry!

• Today at 1PM ET, Marcus Olsson (who maintains the unofficial plugin developer documentation) will explain accepting user input using commands and ribbon actions to make your plugin more useful. Then, Sam Morrison (who created Buttons and maintains Templater) will talk about how to contribute to popular plugins without writing a single line of code. It'll be on Twitch and Youtube.

• Next week, October 15, Nicole van der Hoeven and Leah Ferguson will have a live discussion of how to use Obsidian to take good D&D notes.

Obsidian Updates

• v. 0.16.4 & 0.16.5 were mostly bugfixes.

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.

• System Theme by @jgauth is a plugin to automatically update to system theme.

• Blockquote Levels by @czottmann adds commands for increasing/decreasing the blockquote level of the current line or selection.

Pending (as of Friday morning)

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.

• Actions URI by @czottmann adds additional x-callback-url endpoints to the app for common actions — it's a clean, super-charged addition to Obsidian URI.

• Repeat by @prncc is another way to review notes using periodic or spaced repetition.

• Readavocado Sync by @innneang makes it easier to sync Readavocado highlights with Obsidian

• Plugin Update Tracker by @swar8080 makes it easier to know when installed plugins have updates and evaluate the risk of upgrading

• Obsidian MtG by @omardelarosa is a plugin for managing Magic: The Gathering decks and card lists as Obsidian notes.

• Sync Graph Settings by @Xallt makes it easier to sync graph settings (like Color Groups) to local graphs

Updates

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

• Another Quick Switcher 7.1.0 added an "open in new tab in background" command in the dialog.

• Front Matter Title 2.3.0 added support for the Starred plugin.

• Obsidian Linter v1.6.0 now has the ability to search settings and has them broken into tabs on both desktop and mobile.

• Notion Like Tables got a major rework and now will allow you to edit tabular data in live preview mode. Note that previously-created tables will need to be migrated.

Betas

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

• Omnisearch is looking for beta testers for its new PDF indexing. This is a feature that I, personally, have really been looking forward to having in Obsidian and I'm extremely grateful for the hard work @Sim put into it.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a dataview query to list tasks by priority that was posted in Discord.

Guides

• Tyler Suzuki on Twitter explained the benefits of how he uses tags to keep track of his 12 top-of-mind problems and relate them to whatever he's writing about.

• Nicole van der Hoeven did a nice, practical video about how to choose between Dataview and Database Folder for a specific use-case; tracking kickstarters.  

• Marcus Olsson Learn did a great community event about how to get up and running with building your first plugin, no previous experience required!

• Basic Dataview Query Builder v1.0 is designed to help make Dataview more accessible. Give it a spin!  

• I really loved this visual of a zettelkasten process from @Kristoffer#4553 in Discord.

• Here's how to do time blocking with the Tasks plugin.

Discussions

• Here's Nick Milo and Tiago Forte talking about the rise of Obsidian as a Second Brain.

• Michael Brener Marcus interviewed Michael, the creator of the popular Dataview plugin, to learn how he got started and where Dataview is going.

• Here's a lovely reminder from Discord that Obsidian doesn't have to be your "everything app" to still be useful. For example, here's a great task management system that leverages Todoist and Obsidian together from full time author @pdworkman#8720. Conversely, here's a discussion on Reddit with people discussing what they use Obsidian for — and for some folks, it's a lot!

• Some folks on Reddit discussed using Obsidian for planning and writing a novel, which is timely given that National Novel Writing Month is fast approaching.

Showcases

• Here's a really awesome trailer for Obsidian that was shared on Reddit, and inspired one of my favorite D&D related Obsidian exchanges... but I don't want to spoil the effect ;)

Ancillary Tools

• MarkDownload, which lets you download a webpage as a markdown file, now has support for the Advanced URI plugin.

• Actions for Obsidian adds Obsidian actions to the Shortcuts app on macOS and iOS.

• If you want to clip web content on Android, here's a Reddit thread detailing some tips.

Housekeeping

I had a day off work so I took some time to write down an article for Obsidian October comprehensively covering how I take notes. I've done a couple of explanatory videos but hadn't had anything up to date and written out to point people to for awhile. Unfortunately, I didn't finish it yet, since it's about 5,000 words and growing 🙈 but here's the twitter thread in which I shared some sneak peeks while I wrote it.