🌠 Database Plugins and More New Themes

Eleanor's out sick, but will hopefully be feeling better by the Linking Your Thinking Conference later this month 👀

💎 Since Eleanor has Covid and is therefore staying in bed this week, @pseudometa (aka Chris Grieser) is helping with this edition of the Roundup.

In the Community

• The first annual Linking Your Thinking Conference will be the week of Mon, May 16 - Fri, May 20. There will be talks on research, Zettelkasten, journaling, personal retreats, how folder-based paradigms might complement link-based ones, and much more.

• Enrollment for the next LYT workshop (to start on Tuesday, June 14th) opens tomorrow. Sign up for the LYT newsletter if you're interested.

• Bianca Pereira is running a series of events about personal knowledge management for research. Here's a recording of last week's talk about atomic visuals.

Obsidian Updates

Insider 0.14.8 is now available. There are tons of updates for users of Obsidian Publish, most noteworthy multiple users can now collaboratively publish to the same site. The update changes how cursors and selections work.

• 0.14.8 therefore breaks the cursor for users of the Minimal Theme. You can update to the latest version to fix that.

• There is also an issue with selection in Vim's visual mode, but a fix will be coming with 0.14.9.

In the Hub

• There is a new beginner guide on Markdown Syntax. It covers the general Markdown Syntax, Obsidian-specific Syntax, and some lesser known syntax like how to do line breaks in tables or how to put a code block inside a code block.

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.

• Paste png to jpeg is a plugin that does exactly that.

• Obsidian Folder Index can automatically create an index of files in a folder.

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.

• Obsidian Database Plugin enables creating databases based on files in Obsidian, similar to Dataview. It uses files in a directory as a data source and, as opposed to Dataview, it is editable.

• The Database Folder Plugin, on the other hand, allows you to create tables similar to Notion. (Not to be confused with the recently published Notion-like tables plugin. Gosh, we really need more distinctive plugin names.)

• Obsidian attendance allows event organizers to make attendance lists in Obsidian. To the dismay of all the students using Obsidian, this plugin will probably also be useful for teachers.

• There is now an ePub Reader plugin.

• Enhancing Export uses pandoc for better export options of your notes.

• braincache obsidian allows you to create flashcards for the app braincache.

• Meta title filename lets you replace the filename of a plugin with data from the yaml frontmatter of a note.

• Folder Focus Mode Lets you hide all but the selected folder in the file explorer.

• Obsidian iframes lets you embed iframes into your notes that are saved as local files.

• Obsidian Bellboy is an "Opinionated file structure manager" that uses emojis from the note's metadata and kebab-casing.

• Obsidian Translator allows you to translated selected text.

• code-embed allows you to embed code files, similar to PDFs and images. Currently, only currently  .c .cpp .js .hs are supported though.

• obsidian-functionplot creates mathematical graphs in Obsidian.

• Local Quotes collects quotes from all over your vault and embeds them at a place of your choosing.

Updates

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

• Obsidian Chat View has added WebVTT support and a Minimal Mode.

• Jump to Link now works in Source Mode.

• Various Complements introduces intelligent suggestion prioritization, i.e. frequently or recently used items are placed further to the top.

• Remotely Save has some bug fixes.

• Text {{expand}} now has $matchline options which, well, allow you to match lines (including options for preceding/following lines).

• The jTab plugin introduces fully customizable colors.

• Smarter Markdown Hotkeys now supports Chinese Text.

• Omnisearch, the drop-in replacement for the Core Search Plugin, now supports "quoted expressions" and -exclusions. The new version also downranks notes added to Obsidian's "Excluded Files" list.

• Another Quick Switcher introduces a new Header Search, which is basically a Quick Switcher for the headings of the current note. This new feature preserves the order of headings in the suggester, it could be used for example as a keyboard-friendly alternative for the Outline Core plugin.

• Advanced Slides now supports autocompletion for its syntax, and supports webp images.

Betas

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

• ExcaliBrain seeks to integrate Excalidraw and Obsidian even further. Here is a brief (6 min) video showcasing what you can do with it.

• Pandoc Reference List is becoming more and more a staple for academic work in Obsidian, and has – while still in beta – introduced a couple of new updates for styling Pandoc citations, checking for invalid citekeys, and hover tooltips of the references.

Under The Radar

• Obsidian Vim Tutor came up again as a good tutorial for learning how to use vim mode in Obsidian.

For Developers

There are three changes in the latest insider release that are relevant for plugin developers:

• Fixed tab not working in modals.

• registerDomEvent can now take an options object (for things like {capture: true}).

• Added goWordLeft and goWordRight editor commands.

Theme developers: The upcoming release 0.14.8 has some changes regarding the styling of cursors and selections.

• Among other things, the selector for selections is now ::selection and customizability of cursors is restricted to changing the color.

• The upside for this is this will significantly improve Obsidian's performance.

The new (still pending) User Plugins for Obsidian Plugin allows you to access the Obsidian API, as if you have created a plugin. This will likely be useful for testing out new plugin ideas, or to streamline scripts that as of right now have been implemented via the Templater Plugin (To be frank, the fact that many people, including myself, use Templater for everything but templates, has been kind of confusing for new users, indeed.)

Feature Requests

• @Zektor suggested a built-in browser for templates, similar to the theme and plugin browser.

• A way for a more informative and structured Graph View has been requested at reddit. Another thread discusses how the Graph could differentiate between link types.

Appearance

• Violet evening does pretty much what the name says: it turns your whole vault into an elegant purple.

• The well-known Zenburn color palette got an Obsidian theme implementation.

• Shimmering Focus got its big 2.0 update, which introduces a new default color scheme (co-designed with @lkadre), full new color customizations, various features for Vim users,and more. (Yeah, "promoting" my own update feels a bit weird.)

• Viridian by @mulfolk is still in the making, but already looks very promising. It has a playful vibe, a bit like primary, but with a different color palette. There is also a sneak peek at GitHub you can check out.

Ancillary Code

• Here is a simple snippet to turn off the blinking of cursors

• Discord QoL improvement: You can use post !plugin <search-term> in Discord and a search link will be created automatically.

Guides

• @n_vanderhoeven published a guide / YouTube video on using GTD (Getting Things Done Methodology) in Obsidian with the Checklist plugin.

• @deezy shared an extensive system for (technical) documentation.

• This 20-minute video explains how to use Excalidraw for flow charts and mindmaps in Obsidian.

Discussions

• Nick Milo discussed workflows with the Mac Power Users podcast.

• There has been a discussion on how to use a location/based or two-tracked task system for those doing hybrid work (some days working from home, some days in the office.)

• People on reddit discussed how to use Obsidian for studying.

• Folks on Twitter discussed how callout boxes can be valuable.

Showcases

• Here's a tour of a vault that uses a habit tracker and the PARA structure.

• Here you can find a big list of digital gardens.

• And here is a really great-looking showcase for tracking goals in Obsidian, including a detailed guide how to recreate that.

• Here's a new user talking about how Obsidian improved his life.

Ancillary Tools

• Pandoc users: @atlas shared their filter for callouts.

• The Obsidian Extension for Raycast introduces a lot new features and improvements. (Raycast is an alternative to Alfred.)

Housekeeping

For a while now, I have prominently displayed the following quote on the promo screenshot of my theme:

"The most aggressively minimalistic theme I am aware of."
– The Obsidian Roundup

…now that I am writing for the roundup myself, this feels like some kind of awkward self-promotion. 😅

Therefore, the quote is now personally attributed to Eleanor instead of "The Obsidian Roundup" in general.