🌠 Git plugins & OCR improvements

Improved inbox experiences, more better backlinks, gems of the year voting, & a new scifi theme based on Cyberpunk 2077.

Community

• Voting for Gems of the Year 2022 is happening in the Discord community this year. Here's a link if you need it. Here's the message to vote for plugins, here's the message to vote for themes.

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.

• Easygit by @chenxuan520  makes it easier to use git control files.

• Git Sync by @oscarspalk  is another method to sync your vault with Github.

• GProxy by @PhoenixFEC accelerates community plugin installations; sources are from some mirrors.

• Pivotal Tracker Integration by @JonnyDeates  is an unofficial pivotal tracker integration plugin for Obsidian. This plugin allows the user to pull stories, chores, bugs from their pivotal counterpart.

• Vim Toggle Plugin by @conneroisu  enables the use of togging vim mode on and off inside of the editor.

• ProgressBar by @zwpaper  render CodeBlocks into a ProgressBar.

• Text Progress Bar by @michaeladams  displays low-fi text progress bars in your notes.

• Metacopy & URL by @Lisandra-dev  lets users copy the value of a frontmatter key and allows creation of links from it using various settings.

• Inbox by @Zachatoo  shows in app notifications if there is data to process in the "inbox" note.

• Emoji Magic by @SimplGy  makes it easier to add emojis by dint of improved keyword search

• Reading comments by @BumbrT  allows you to create comments while you read books or articles in Obsidian. Comments could be grouped hierarchically by tags.

• Air Quotes by @alangrainger lets users search and insert quotes from a source text as you type; useful for reading a physical book or eReader while taking notes on a separate laptop or phone.

• Spotify by @tokenshift  lets you embed songs, albums and playlists from Spotify in your Obsidian notes.

• Backslash LaTeX Macro by @Bjarno  will replace LaTeX macros with (Unicode) characters.

Updates

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

• Obsidian-OCR v2.0.0 was a huge update that switched from the JSON-file based approach to a local SQLite database (which means less clutter), got a new search algorithm, the ability to ignore folders, set file-specific OCR settings, the ability to pause, and more.

• Webpage HTML Export 1.4.0 now supports MacOS and Linux. 1.4.1 added an option to reformat all file and folder names to be lowercase with hyphens instead of spaces (conforming to web naming standards).

• Excalidraw 1.8.12 allows users to pin custom pens and favorite scripts, and has a new mindmap formatting script.

• Ava now allows users to create tags automatically from notes.

• Database Folder 3.3.0 now allows internal links inside tags and select column types, among other improvements.

• Tasks 1.24.0 added support for additional custom statuses.

• The alternative backlinks plugin, Influx, got a bunch of visual improvements and now works in Reading more.

• Daily Note Outline v0.6.0 now treats checkboxes separately from list items, and got a bunch of other improvements.

For Developers

• Here's a huge list of typography sites with explanations of how to use the variable and static fonts for theming in Discord.

Appearance

• Ukiyo 2.1.0 supports modes for color schemes, new custom callouts and classes, and altered the design so that the UI is a little more compact.

• Cyber Glow v7.7 got a bunch of Style Settings, and improved stacked tabs support.

• Revin by @NicolasGHS is a new scifi theme based on Cyberpunk 2077.

Guides

• Here's a nice beginner's guide to how to use folgezettel in a zettelkasten, which is useful for those interested in a bottom-up organizational system.

• Here's how to set up an Obsidian vault using the Johnny Decimal system.

Discussions

• Here's a nice discussion of how people use Obsidian for worldbuilding and writing books.

Showcases

• Here's how Nicole van der Hoeven has Obsidian set up to handle world creation, NPCs, maps, stat blocks, encounter tracking, etc. for tabletop rpgs in 2023.

Ancillary Tools

• Folks who self-host using services like Gatsby and Netlify might be interested to note that Netlify bought Gatsby.

Paid Options

• Bianca Pereira, one of the instructors for Linking Your Thinking, is building a live cohort based community for writers who want to create research-backed content; the ~$800 membership includes access to courses on PKM for Research and research skills. Here's a 15% off coupon code.

Housekeeping

A few folks have reached out wondering if there's anything they can do to help out since I've been having a tough time with my pregnancy (my osteitis pubis problems are back and more gnarly than ever). I'm due in late July, so sometime in June I'm probably going to put out an official request for guest posts to help make sure the newsletter doesn't go radio silent when I am busy being sleep-deprived with a newborn.

If you've got any interest in writing up an article of basically any kind as long as it's interesting, and having it hosted here on the newly-minted Obsidian Iceberg, think about it and let me know so I can gauge interest and start planning.

To see some examples of this in action, Chris Grieser did with how to take big notes and how to take small notes for Obsidian October, and Tahereh Safavi wrote one about the possible relationship between selective female infanticide / polygyny to the Viking age once when I got really sick, so it's not without precedent. Hopefully this will be fun for community members to share info about stuff they're passionate about for folks who don't necessarily want go thru the effort of setting up a whole blog for a one-off thing.