🌠 More LLM Integrations & Sample Notes for Cooking, Workouts, etc.

Obsidian's nominated for a Golden Kitty in Productivity, there's a new RGB theme. Plus, fancy new dataview & templater scripts for day planning & YouTube metadata.

In The Community

• Obsidian was nominated on ProductHunt for a Golden Kitty award in the Productivity category.

• Scholarships for the Linking Your Thinking Workshop run by Nick Milo are open until January 21 at 11:59 PST. They read every application; expect results to be communicated by email on January 24.

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.

• Task Marker by @wenlzhang  lets users change task statuses with hotkeys and context menu. Users can complete, cancel and mark tasks, as well as cycle among selected task statuses.

• Pending notes by @ulisesantana  makes it easier to search links without notes in your vault.

• Email code block by @joleaf  renders an email code block.

• Order List by @lizard-heart  orders lists by the number at the end of line

• GPT by @jmilldotdev  allows for GPT & Large Language Model completions in the editor via an API.

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.

• Text Wrapper by @smx0  makes it easier to quickly wrap selected text with HTML tags by using a shortcut or from the command palette

• DMN Eval Plugin by @joleaf  enables evaluating/executing DMN

• Chat-GPT Assistant by @OwenKruse  adds integration from Chat-GPT text completion into Obsidian

• Advanced Paste by @kxxt  provides several advanced paste commands for Obsidian.

• Obsidian Plugin Manager by @ohm-en  allows for lazy loading of plugins to make Obsidian start faster, and toggle plugins on and off via the command palette or hotkeys.

• Graph Presets by @ycnmhd brings markdown-based graph controls that you can switch between.

• ActivityWatch by @LordGrimmauld  adds compatibility between ActivityWatch and Obsidian.

• Obsidian Graph Search Hotkey by @AstralTomate  allows users to set a hotkey to switch to the search bar in the Graph view.

• Vault Transfer by @ImaginaryProgramming  copies a note and pastes it into another vault.

• Smart Prompts by @brianpetro  provides prompt templating tools designed for interacting with language interfaces like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

• Unicode Search by @BambusControl  makes it easier to search and insert Unicode characters into your editor

• Awesome Image by @AwesomeDog  offers improved image management, particularly local saving and automatic processing.

Updates

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

• The AVA developers request that all users update to the newest version because of a bug driving up their costs. The latest version comes with faster start times, improved control over links, displays of most-used rewrites, and a new tutorial. The plugin lets users quickly format your notes with ChatGPT; I've found it handy for turning transcripts of my voice notes into something more coherent.

• Code Editor Shortcuts can now includes all the features of the Toggle Case plugin.

• Sentence Navigator added features allowing users to select to start and end of a sentence. It also improved compatibility with Outliner.

• Omnisearch 1.10 added support for canvases, as well as Text Extractor.

• CardBoard v0.7.0 fixed a nasty edge case bug, and now supports all valid CommonMark unordered list markers (-, +, *).

• Front Matter Title 2.9.0 improved alias  handling.

• Auto Link Title 1.3.0 has canvas support, the ability to blacklist websites, hotkeys for normal pasting, and some fixes.

• Another Quick Switcher 8.4.0 added "open in default app" commands to the Main dialog and Move dialogs.

• Excalidraw 1.8.10 got some quality of life improvements, including a new image export screen and new actions in the hamburger menu and splash screen of empty drawings. Here's a video version of the release notes.

Betas

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

• Canvas MOC makes it easier to translate maps of contents and complex indexes onto Canvases.

For Developers

• Here's a plugin to make it easier to make test vaults, with commands that let you make (and destroy) a bunch of random notes. You can still use this to test out your plugin in numerous ways, such as if you are building an alternate rendering system, or statistics, or any such thing where having data in the notes (even if that data is nonsensical) is useful.

• If anyone was keeping an eye out for a small project on a small plugin to get their feet wet with Obsidian plugin development, here's one: let users designate folders to extract text into.

Appearance

• Dracula Gemini by @clbn  is a new dark variation on the Dracula color palette.

• Jotter by @lnbgc  is a new distraction-free theme.

• Abyssal by @tazpellegrini  is a new theme focused on accessibility and typography.

• Cyber Glow v7.6.3 got a bunch of improvements and supports more plugins now, as well as stacked tabs.

• AnuPpuccin v1.2.8 got Notion-like Kanbans, a Notionish color scheme, and some other improvements.

• Encore got a big rewrite, enabling a bunch of new color schemes accessible via Style settings, as well as support for RGB theming.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a templater code that will pull in basic metadata for YouTube videos.

• Here's a DataviewJS snippet to show todo items from the current file in a time table, similar to the Day Planner plugin.

Guides

• Here's a nice guide for how to use the Advanced Tables Plugin in the context of tabletop roleplaying.

• Here's a method to cross-pollinate ideas  using a zettelkasten system in Obsidian.

Discussions

• Nicole van der Hoeven was interviewed about Obsidian and Productivity for Creators.

• Here's how some folks use Obsidian for cooking; more specifically, some use Kanban for meal planning.

Showcases

• Here's a nice overview of 8 different ways to use Obsidian, along with examples.

• Here's a neat way to get a workout table in Obsidian -- you'll need to scroll up a few messages in Discord to see the snippet that makes it all look nice. Reddit also had a great showcase of how to use Obsidian as a gym log.

• Here's a comprehensive collection of George Carlin resources in markdown format, along with a lovely screenshot of how it renders in Obsidian.

• Similarly, here's some introductory information on some models of therapy.

• Here's a lovely screenshot in Discord of how one can harmonize their Obsidian theme with different apps like Discord, Spotify, & neovim so all the apps are visually consistent.

• This is a really neat note from an ecologist working in forest restoration and climate resilience, followed by a fascinating discussion by folks in similar fields and how they use Obsidian.

• Here's a nifty demonstration of embracing the concept of atomic folders.

• Here's how Canvas can help analyze and engage with something like the Tao Te Ching.

• Here's a nice discussion surrounding a Cultural Studies vault focused on how to revisit and rediscover useful notes once you reach the >10,000 links point of working on a Master's degree.

Ancillary Tools

• Here's a tool to help open, create, and update Obsidian notes from your terminal.

Housekeeping

• In theory The Great Newsletter Consolidation of 2023 is over, which should make things immensely easier on me in August when I've got a newborn and a 3 year old at home and a job I don't want to take 2 years of leave from. To that end, links should now redirect from obsidianroundup.org to eleanorkonik.com -- unfortunately when I tried to get obsidianroundup.org to redirect straight to the "obsidian roundup" specific page at https://www.eleanorkonik.com/tag/roundup/ everything else broke horribly 🙁

• Most RSS feeds should have redirected correctly, but if you're getting flooded with content you don't want because the old RSS feed now has all the content for eleanorkonik.com remember that you can always subscribe directly to just the weekly Obsidian Roundup itself and not any of my other essays or articles by using https://www.eleanorkonik.com/tag/roundup/rss/ -- this works with all the other tags, too, which you can check out on the navigation page. Incidentally, the Navigation page also shows how many posts there are in each category; looks like we're coming up on our 100th edition on March 25 🤯

• If anybody is signed up to emails wants the extra essays, just sign in at the website (there's no password, Ghost uses email authentication) and click the relevant checkbox. This week's edition for everyone was about historical cleaning methods from around the world, from lotus leaves to bronze knives. The financial supporters edition was about my favorite productivity app that isn't a productivity app 🦁