🌠 Dataview Example Vault, Book Club, & Ecosystem Stats

Memes about minimalism, bullet backlinks plugin, timeshifting, a book club, and an upcoming mystery event.

In The Community

• For an upcoming mysterious community event, the Obsidian team is looking for speakers to talk about plugin development! DM Silverica#8456 on Discord if you'd love to give a talk, whether you have a topic in mind or not. In addition to all the community love you get, you might also get a special merch shirt.

• Here's the ranked voting survey for the Obsidian book club. The deadline for voting is September 20 at 17:00 EST. You can find more details in the #off-topic thread for the book club in Discord.

• Does anybody have any good guides on how to use n8n for anything related to Obsidian? It feels like there are opportunities to use it, but I generally only hear about Zapier even though n8n is self-hostable. What's up with that?

• Here's a super neat write-up about Obsidian ecosystem statistics including a best guess of how many (estimated) users use Windows, Mac, or (various distributions of) Linux, as well as how many downloads there were for themes and plugins. Only 3 themes have been downloaded more than 100,000 times!

• For those who aren't familiar with it, the Obsidian Meme subreddit is new but a lot of fun, especially this one about minimalists after installing Obsidian 0.16

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.

• TikZJax by @artisticat1  renders LaTeX and TikZ diagrams in your notes

• Janitor by @Canna71  performs cleanup tasks on your vault

• Todoist completed tasks by @Ledaryy  fetches completed tasks from todoist API and adds them to the Obsidian note.

• Day and Night by @CyberT17  automatically toggles themes between day theme and night theme on a set time schedule.

• Script Launcher by @AlessandroRuggiero  launches scripts from bottom bar with just one click.

• Auto Hide by @skelato1  collapses sidebars when clicking on the editor/viewer panel.

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.

• Influx by @jensmtg is a bullet journaling plugin that aggregates a terse stream of backlinked clippings in the footer of notes. It looks designed for outliners that don't want to mess with folders and tags but do want to use daily notes. If I'm understanding it correctly it should make people used to the Roam/Logseq paradigm intrigued.

• Custom File Explorer sorting by @SebastianMC  allows for manual and automatic, config-driven reordering and sorting of files and folders in File Explorer.

• Image Inserter by @cloudy9101 helps users easily search and insert images to editors from Unsplash.

• 3D Graph by @AlexW00 uses D3.js to create an alternate graph view that lets nodes overlap.

• Time Tracker by @daaru00  lets users add timer widgets.

• AWS S3 Sync by @daaru00  will synchronize vaults with an AWS s3 bucket, making it another option for third party syncing.

• System Theme by @jgauth is to help Linux users adapt their theme to adapt to the system theme.

• Publish by @addozhang  makes it easier to upload local images embedded in markdown to a remote store, and export markdown for publishing to static site.

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

Updates

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

• The folks over at Club Macstories updated Export Markdown with Embeds, an Obsidian plugin for longform writing, and added new syntax for highlighting and compiling passages of text from a longform story.

• Database Folder now has mobile support, the option to import CSVs from the menu, and new metadata options for inlinks and outlinks. 2.6.0 added a new type of column for defining rules to display information about other cells in the same row.

• Sentence Navigator v1.1.1 added a setting to configure sentence regex.

• The editing toolbar added a formatting eraser to clear the text formatting, and now works fine in popout windows.

• FleetingNotesApp 0.3.5 sync to Obsidian pluigin lets usres set default sync folder to FleetingNotesApp, added created_date and modified_date as variables, and more.

• Metadata Menu now supports timeshifting: you can now set shift intervals to push Date fields in the future. It's useful for spaced repetition and project management. Here's a demo.

• Bulk Rename 0.3.5 got a nice UI overhaul.

• Readwise Inbox for Obsidian added tag support. Here's a nifty walkthrough.

• Supercharged Links v0.9.0 now also supercharges tab headers.

• The Path Finder Plugin now supports hotkeys.

Betas

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

• Inline Scripts 0.22.0 added a panel that allows a user to add custom buttons that run shortcuts when clicked, shortcut links, tutorial videos, and UI supplements. Here's a demo.

Feature Requests

• Querying by parent bullet a la a "traditional" outliner would require a complete re-write of the Tasks plugin code... which doesn't mean it's impossible 👀 if anyone is up for creating a way to store full information about the tree of indented bullets it is within, I imagine some folks would be grateful.

• Share if you'd like the vault name to always be visible, even if you click away from the Files pane.

Appearance

• v6.6 of CyberGlow revamped light mode, added stylized callouts that support <cite> tags, and more.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a CSS snippet to make code blocks look a little fancier.

• Here's a CSS snippet to hide block IDs in live preview.

Guides

• This has been out for awhile, but it came up again on Twitter this week, and it's a method I use too so I want to share it again. Here's how to use Fantasy Calendar plugin to create a content calendar in Obsidian.

• Here's a nice guide for Mac users to create Hazel rules for organizing notes and automating repeated tasks.

• Here's a guide to using the PodNotes plugin.

• Here's a guide for using the ExcaliBrain Obsidian plugin as an alternative to graph view.

Discussions

• Reddit had a neat discussion about structured vs. unstructured linking.

Showcases

• This is a dataview example vault is a fully functional downloadable vault intended to collect and explain various dataview queries, from based examples to complex javascript based ones. There's also a nice overview section.

• Here's a vault on github of about 500 notes about computers, software, programming, etc. There's also a nice list of note-taking methods used in its creation.

Ancillary Tools

• The Alfred Workflow for Obsidian (Shimmering Obsidian v.2.27.4) was updated for Obsidian v0.16 and now has support for enabling and disabling plugins via the Advanced URI plugin; 3.0 migrated to Alfred 5 options, re-wrote the docs, and deprecated the Daily Note features -- check out this alternative if you relied on it.

• Glasp now allows users to highlight YouTube video transcripts and export them as Markdown.

• Nicole van der Hoeven shared why she likes Readwise Reader. At 16:31 she talks about how she uses it with Obsidian.

• Relatedly, this month's premium tips edition was all about how I use RSS to curate opportunities, and although Readwise Reader isn't limited to RSS and it's entirely possible to replicate the workflow described using things other than Reader, there is a screenshot of how I take notes in Reader and send them to Obsidian.