🌠 Drag & Drop Blocks and Create Notionesque Tables

There are some powerful new Publish alternatives & academic workflow guides.

Obsidian Updates

The new public release used Electron 18; if you noticed something weird with your PDFs, get the Electron 17 based installer.

Also, as of Insider 0.14.6, users can now add folders to an ignore filter. Files matched by this filter will be down-ranked when using Quick Switcher and link suggestions, and will be excluded in search results and graph view.

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.

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

• Book Search by @anpigon automatically creates notes by searching for books by book title, author, publisher or ISBN (10 or 13). It uses the Google Books API to get the information.

• Obsidian Ghost Publish by @jaynguyens allows for single click publishing to the Ghost publishing platform.

• Snippet Downloader by @Mara-Li is basically a snippet manager for people who have snippets they downloaded from gists and repositories.

• Link Keeper by @luhaifeng666 is intended to help manage frequently used links.

• Obsidian jTab by @davfive adds the ability to show guitar chords and tabs directly in your notes using jTab.

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

• Template Enabled Day Planner by @amykhar is for day planning and managing pomodoro timers from a task list in a Markdown note.

• Typing speed by @Supercip971 will show the current typing speed in the status bar

• Paste image rename by @reorx supports name patterns and auto renaming.

• KoreanBook Info Plugin by @kmsk99 crawls the online book retailer Yes24 to get book information.

Updates

• Various Complements plugin v5.11.0 got some improvements to reduce the likelihood of conflicts with other plugins.

• Another Quick Switcher plugin v4.8.0 got some new hotkeys.

• Full Calendar now supports one-way sync with private Apple Calendars, along with any calendar that uses the CalDAV protocol over HTTP basic authentication.

• QuickAdd v0.5.4 added support for aliases in the file suggester.

• Custom Frames now supports displaying custom frames in your markdown documents, i.e. embedding a calendar in your daily notes. You can also add a ribbon icon for any frame you want, and display a frame in the center editor.

• The typewriter scroll plugin can now be toggled on/off without having to reset obsidian. You can also set the scroll offset now.

Betas

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

• Omnisearch is developing into an improved search method for Obsidian. It weights different parts of the file (name, title, body) differently, reacts intelligently to typos, and has better fuzzy search.

• Periodic Notes 1.0 Beta supports multiple daily notes per day, and frontmatter support so you can name your files whatever you want.

• mkdocs publisher — Obs2mk now has better support for Github Actions, and a plugin! There are more details in Discord.

Feature Requests

• It really would be nice if we could search pdfs from inside of Obsidian.

• Here are some suggested graph node size customizability options. In a similar vein, it would be nice if folders had any impact on the graph view whatsoever.

Appearance

• AbsoluteGruv by @kkYrusobad should be coming to the community list soon.

• Shimmering Focus hides floating metadata blocks & YAML frontmatter, tho this can be disabled with Style Settings. Footnotes in Reading mode do not affect line height anymore, and there are now hue sliders in Style settings, which should make customizing colors easier.

• Blue Topaz supports multiple calendars, and improved callout types.

• Willemstad X v0.4.0 Nyhavn got a bunch of breaking changes involving more customizations, particularly for custom readable line lengths.

• Here's a guide on how to get a beautiful homepage.

Guides

• Here's a nice guide for using Obsidian while working with CSS, markdown and Javascript on an iPad.

• Here's an updated academic workflow using Obsidian and Zotero — specifically the new Zotero Desktop Connector plugin.

• Here's a "starter kit" for automated weekly reviews which uses Dataview inline fields to roll up into weekly logs and the tracker plugin as a habit tracker. It comes with a handy video.

• Here's a guide on Discord about how to use Citavi for generating directories of notes by publication.

• Here's a hack to force install hover editor on a tablet.

• Here's how to manage blog writing using Obsidian.

• The Hub has a new guide for automated plugin testing, and added new ways to use Zettelkasten for creative writing.

Discussions

• Here's a big discussion (189 replies!) on Reddit about people's biggest pain points (and, in some cases, which plugins could help solve them :D)

• Here's a discussion on Twitter about how to indicate whether a claim is weak or strong.

• Over on Twitter, I shared a quick example of a situation for why I prefer to leave quotes in my source notes instead of spinning them out into my atomic notes with stuff like the note composer plugin (or this alternate Zettelizer script). A couple of other people shared how they prefer to do it.

• Here's a discussion about various methods to encrypt a vault.

• Reddit has some good advice for people taking lecture notes on new topics.

• And for people using Obsidian to manage engineering.

Showcases

• Here's a really neat physics and math wiki.

Ancillary Tools

• The Raycast Obsidian extension now has support for opening and creating daily notes, appending selected text to ntoes, prefixes for appended text, and more.

• Here's how to bulk pull DOIs for all your papers in Zotero, even if they don't have DOIs yet.

• Zola is an alternative to Obsidian publish. It has a pretty nifty graph view and nicely slugified URLs.

Housekeeping

Now that I'm writing more essays, I decided it was time to overhaul the Roundup's landing page to make different types of posts easier to find. There's also now a button at the bottom to let you change modes; just click the moon to get into dark mode, or the sun to get into light mode. It's to the right of the RSS :)

Also, I got a couple of reports of something going wrong with my email automation (edge case McGee strikes again!) — if you got duplicate (or weirdly frequent) emails from me, I'm so sorry and am working on getting it resolved :(