🌠 Obsidian October Winners & AI Integrations

A guide for using Readwise with Obsidian, a demo vault for computer engineering students, & the first Canvas plugins.

In The Community

Here's a list of all 84 entrants for Obsidian October, but the winners were:

• New Plugin: Obsidian Projects by Marcus Olsson

• New Plugin Student Pick: make.md by JP

• New Theme: Origami by kneecaps

• Plugin Update: Obsidian-OCR by Jonas Mohr

• Theme Update: Shimmering Focus Rewrite for Obsidian 1.0 by pseudometa

• Written Content: The Konik Method for Making Useful Notes by me 😊

• Written Content Student Pick: How to Boost Your Productivity for Scientific Research Using Obsidian by Leonardo Castorina

• Video: Obsidian Onboarding by Danny Hatcher

• Video Student Pick: How I Write Conceptual Lecture Notes in Obsidian by Aidan Helfant

• Demo Vault:  Obsidian for Biblical & Theological Studies by Limezy

• Demo Vault Student Pick: MISS W by Kinmury (for Computer Engineers).

Click through to check out the runners up! There was a lot of fantastic content created in October.

Obsidian Updates

• v1.1.3 had a bunch of Canvas improvements, and Live Preview mode should no longer flash with unstyled text while scrolling big documents.

• v1.1.4 also improved Canvas, but the main thing is that you can now "Group" things on your Canvas; they work a bit like placemats.

• v1.1.5 also improved Canvas (are you sensing a theme), with more options and better rendering when zoomed out.

• v1.1.6 also improved Canvas, making it easier to export the canvas as an image.

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.

• SamePage by @dvargas92495  is the Obsidian client into the inter-TFT-protocol by David Vargas.

• Image Layouts by @vertis  adds beautiful image layouts to your notes.

• BPMN Plugin by @joleaf  enables viewing/editing BPMN diagrams using bpmn-js.

• Daily Notes Editor by @Quorafind  makes it easier to edit a bunch of daily notes in one page, inline.

• Smart Links by @kemayo  allows users to define custom link formats.

• Auto Glossary by @ennioitaliano  automatically create a file with an index and/or glossary.

• Toggle Meta Yaml by @hua03  makes it easier to toggle meta yaml.

• Code Preview by @zjhcn  lets users render code in  a file by creating a preview code block and putting the file path inside, i.e. path: hello.js

• Obsidian asciimath by @widcardw  adds asciimath support.

• Achievements by @Zachatoo makes it easier to gamify habit building.

• Markdown to Jira Converter by @muckmuck96  is a markdown to jira markup (and vice versa) converter.

• New Bullet With Time by @Quorafind  allows you to auto add current time to new bullet line.

• Double Click Tab by @Quorafind  modifies the default behavior when you double click on the tab title, like close tab.

• Hidden Folder by @ptrsvltns  lets users use regular expressions to hide certain folders.

• AWS DynamoDb For Obsidian by @leenattress  lets users query AWS DynamoDb and render tables inside documents.

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.

• Workona To Obsidian by @Holmes555  lets users import Workona resources through generated JSON file.

• Project Garden by @bgoosman  makes it easier to see all your projects in one place.

• FuzzyTag by @adriandersen allows users to fuzzy match autocomplete tags in Frontmatter

• Tab Switcher by @Quorafind  lets users search currently open tabs.

• Paper Import by @zimmerrol  allows automatic import from arXiv and Openreview.

• DMN Plugin by @joleaf  enables viewing DMNs using dmn-js.

• Audio Notes by @jjmaldonis  makes it easier to create notes for audio files based on translations generated by Open AI Whisper.

• Obsidian Mermaid by @dartungar  is an improved Mermaid.js experience for Obsidian, and provides visual toolbar with common elements & more.

• Translate by @Fevol  lets users translate text with lots of different APIs.

• Disable plugins temporarily by @nguyenvanduocit  makes it easier to temporarily disable all plugins.

• Checklist Reset by @lhansford  adds a command to reset the state of any checklists in a document.

• evergreen by @zk4 improves stacked tabs by jumping to an already opened tab if you try to open it again.

• Console Markdown Plugin by @dellermann  renders console commands and their output.

• Base Tag Renderer by @darrenkuro  renders the basename of tags in preview mode.

• Table Code Block by @ptrsvltns  makes interacting with tables in Obsidian a little nicer.

• GPT-3 Notes by @micahke lets users create notes using OpenAI's GPT-3 language model.

• Obsidian Share by @nguyenvanduocit  generates beautiful gradient images from text that can be shared on social media.

• Paste As Html by @maotong06  lets users paste as html, keeping the original css style.

• File Color by @ecustic  makes it easier to set colors on folders and files in the file tree.

• Canvas Presentation by @Quorafind  makes it easier to display cards based on sequence.

• Open Gate by @nguyenvanduocit  makes it easier to embed websites that can't be iframed, like Google Translate.

• Historical Query by @janschlatter  makes it easier to search and insert biographical data from deutsche-biographie.de

• Toggle Case by @MatthewAlner makes it easier to toggle between lowercase UPPERCASE and Title Case, similar to Text Format.

• AI Images by @microtower00 integrates the generation of AI images inside of your Obsidian interface using OpenAI API keys.

• Read Later by @Canna71  makes it esaier to sync web pages to markdown and integrate with read-it-later apps like Pocket and Instapaper by fetching bookmarks from the services and storing them as markdown notes.

• Set In Obsidian by @sandorex  helps with time planning.

Updates

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

• Self-hosted Livesync 0.17.2 can now merge conflicted documents automatically.

• Digital Garden 2.26.0 added support for enabling a table of content in the right sidebar.

• Obsidian Columns 1.4.0 added new callout syntax, which uses plain CSS to create columns. This allows all native obsidian markdown editor features to be available when creating columns.

• Text Generator 0.1.18 added template models.

• Quick Switcher++ 2.3.5 added a new setting to enable accessing the different modes of the switcher from a ribbon icon button.

• Spaced Repetition 1.9.0 added backwards navigation of cards, curly brackets as an option for cloze fields, a new setting to collapse and expand subdecks, and more.

• Tasks 1.20.0 added support for tasks in numbered lists and a new 'priority is not' filter option.

• Readwise Mirror 1.3.0 lets users sort highlights by location and filter discarded highlights.

• Linter 1.9.1 improved header increment support.

• Database Folder 3.0.1 got a bunch of experimental new options involving empty cells.

Betas

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

• Canvas MindMap makes it easier to use Obsidian Canvas as a mindmap, with enter  letting users create a new "brother" node and tab creating a "child" node.

For Developers

• QuickAdd 0.8.0 now has a public API.

• The Vimrc plugin developer is looking for a new maintainer for the plugin.

Appearance

• @stēla shared a CSS snippet to make it easier to see connections inside blocks on the Canvas.

• Apatheia by @AmadeusWM  is a new theme inspired by Things that looks like a lot of fun on Macs.

• Border by @Akifyss  is a new theme with new icons and illustrations.

• Typora-Vue by @ZekunC  is a new theme inspired by the Vue document style.

• Solarized by @harmtemolder reduces brightness contrast but, unlike many low contrast color schemes, retains contrasting hues.

Ancillary Code

• Here is a script to help export data from Heptabase and get it into an Obsidian canvas.

Guides

• Here's how John Mavrick uses Readwise and Obsidian to efficiently take notes.

• Here's how to navigate a Johnny decimal vault better with the quick switcher(s) and specifically the relevance of prefix search.

• Here's a method for how to use Obsidian for personal contact relationship management via @jwalberg in Discord.

• @Damikiller37 in Discord shared a great getting started guide to making a theme.

Discussions

• @oldtowneast@pkm.social did a neat reaction thread to the December 3 edition of the Obsidian Roundup that tests out and evaluates some of the new plugins mentioned.

• Here's a lengthy Reddit thread about whether the goal of personal knowledge management is flawed.

Showcases

• Leah Ferguson's OmniFocus/Obsidian workflow video is now available and explains how she integrates task management and apple software with Obsidian.

• Here's how to use the new Canvas plugin to calculate inbreeding coefficients for sheep. There were also a ton of incredible canvases showcased in the new showcase-canvas channel in Discord.

• Here's a highly opinionated iOS-based sample vault that is practical-minded and extremely detailed in explanation.

• Here's a daily notes template via Discord.

Ancillary Tools

• Readwise Reader, a read it later app that works with youtube videos, has GPT-3 integrations to summarize & translate texts, and sends all of your highlights and annotations to Obsidian, entered public beta this week. Here's the Product Hunt page, and here's the Twitter launch announcement.

Housekeeping

• Reminder: I am taking Christmas and New Year's off. I have a lot of things to catch up on, and I'm going to be out of town for a big chunk of the holiday season. See y'all in January!