🌠 Improved note relationship sensing & Catppuccinos!

Kepano shared some thoughts about the AI-assisted text generation plugins, there's a new plugin for RTL/LTR language detection, plus: improved OCR

In The Community

Note: a bunch of great things happen in Discord every week, but the links require you to be logged in to the community server and generally launch in the browser version of Discord unless you paste them into your app directly. Sorry!

The videos of the 3rd week of Obsidian October live sessions are up:

• Setting up plugin settings with Marcus Olsson.

• Creating a theme for Obsidian 1.0 with Stephan Ango (aka @kepano).

Obsidian Updates

• Obsidian Mobile 1.4.0 updated Mobile to Obsidian 1.0, got a big user interface overhaul, new navigation bars, tabs, haptic feedback, and more. Definitely read the release notes; a lot of things moved around.

• Insider Desktop builds v1.0.1 and v1.0.2 were both mostly bugfixes.

• I really enjoyed this reflection on the update to Obsidian 1.0 and how it disrupted things for one user (Ellane W), but she adapted.

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.

• Influx by @jensmtg is a very exciting alternative backlinks plugin, which displays relevant and formatted excerpts from notes with linked mentions, based on the position of mentions in the notes' hierarchical structure (bullet level indentation).

• Doubleshift by @Qwyntex makes it possible to open the command palette by pressing Shift (or any other key) twice like in IntelliJ and create your own shortcuts

• Novel word count by @isaaclyman displays a word count (and more!) for each file, folder and vault in the File Explorer pane.

• Dynamic RTL by @mwxgaf will change the RTL/LTR direction per line / paragraph, depending on the language.

• Theme Toggler by @larsmagnus adds a theme toggle button to each pane in your workspace, allowing users to set the theme on a per-panel basis, along with adding commands to toggle themes between states.

• HTML Reader by @nuthrash lets users open documents with ".html" and ".htm" file extensions.

• Week Planner by @rwirdemanndefines commands for creating planning documents and moving tasks between them.

• Squiggle by @jqhoogland enables running squiggle code snippets within a note.

Pending (as of Friday morning)

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.

• Relation Pane by @mottox2displays a panel that summarize relations between notes.

• Mathpad by @Canna71 is a fancy calculator that works inline and in the sidebar.

• Obsidian Things3 Sync by @royxue  syncs between Obsidian and Things3, create Todo and sync Todo status.

• qmd as md by @danieltomasz provides an initial support for viewing files with .qmd extension. QMD files contain a combination of markdown and executable code cells and are a format supported by Quarto open source publishing system.

• Obsidian Github Uploader by @yaleiyale uploads the files in your clipboard to Github.

• Status Bar Quote by @yesjinu will display a favored quote in the status bar.

• Old Note Admonitor by @tadashi-aikawashows warnings if the note has not been updated in a period of time you set.

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

• Checkbox 3 states by @hrenaudadds a third state to checkbox list.

Updates

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

• Obsidian OCR v1.3.0 got a bunch of stability and speed improvements, improved installation instructions, previews when searching, and more.

• Digital Garden 2.17.0 introduced the option to show backlinks and a local graph in your published notes.

• Latex Suite 1.6.0 now allows  you to load snippets from another file, which means you can use an external text editor to edit, backup and share snippets with others.

• database folder 2.7.4 now has support for nested YAML fields and the ability to edit the name of tags which updates all the rows and files.

• Excalidraw 1.7.23 added support for webp, bmp, and ico images, which extends the already supported formats (jpg, gif, png, svg). v1.7.24 also got a bunch of bug fixes and a new hook for changing the styling when the canvas color changes. The automations possible with Excalidraw are incredible.

• Obsidian Bulk Rename, Media DB Plugin, Buttons, Obsidian Git, Advanced Slides (and probably more!) updated to have improved compatibility with the Obsidian 1.0 update. Please update often as developers adjust to the new stable (!) API.

Betas

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

• The Omnisearch Beta (which allows for PDF indexing) now works on mobile.

• Strange New Worlds, from @TfTHacker is meant to help show the interconnections between notes and is sort of a spiritual successor to the Block Ref Counter plugin.

Appearance

• ITS Theme, Wyrd, CyberGlow, Shimmering Focus (and probably more!) have been updated to work with Obsidian 1.0 – please update your themes if you experience problems.

• Fusion by @zamsyt aims at minimalism and has a nice blue tint.

• The Catppuccino color scheme (a "soothing pastel theme for the high-spirited") is now available in Catppuccin by @mbeckrich, AnuPpuccin by @AnubisNekhet, and Minimal by @kepano. The latter two support several other popular color schemes as well.

• Dayspring by @erykwalder looks particularly nice for religious texts: it allows for putting things like verse numbers besides paragraphs in an unobtrusive way, outside of the flow of the main text.

• Here's a snippet in Discord to turn the highlightr plugin into a plugin that changes text color just with a custom config & a css snippet.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a MacOS shortcut that is useful for intersitial journal entries explained in both video and written form.

Guides

• This is a pretty good explanation of how to use Obsidian as a content management system for a website without using the official Publish plugin, with the Obsidian vault and website directory as sibling directories so that it's easier to distinguish between public/private notes. It's a pretty novel approach as far as I know.

• Here's an excellent introduction to markdown for beginners video.

• This thread explains a method for database style queries with lots of screenshots.

• Martine Ellis shared a system for idea generation, journaling, and article outputs.

• This video describes an approach to planning music classes & ensembles using Obsidian.

Discussions

• There was an interesting folders vs. tags discussion in Discord where some nice thoughts were shared about the value of neat tags and messy subtags.

• Lots of folks on Twitter shared meeting notes templates.

Showcases

• Here's a neat subscription tracker template that uses the Advanced Tables plugin.

• Here's how Zsolt (developer of the Excalidraw plugin) integrates time into notes.

Food For Thought

• @kepano shared some thoughts about AI-assisted writing in the context of some of the relevant Obsidian plugins: Text Generator and Obsidian Ava.