🌠 Email Fetching, Fancy Templating & Improved Longform Writing

Fields for tags, academic workflows, & a great method for using Obsidian to improve onboarding at a new job.

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!

• Here's a great thread on how to show appreciation to plugin developers. Speaking of which, here is @WebInspectInc's nine favorite Obsidian plugins.

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.

• Projects by @marcusolsson is an awesome new plugin to help manage projects in Obsidian; it aligns the most relevant parts of kanbans, databases, and calendars to give you just the aspects of those things you need to handle projects, and I can't wait to integrate it into my vault.

Pending (Happy Obsidian October!)

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.

• Obsidian42 - Strange New Worlds by @TfTHacker counts references to track networked thoughts and provide greater context of the connections you're making.

• Obsidian Handlebars Template Plugin by @sbquinlan adds support for handlebars template blocks in notes. Handlebars is the templating language used by content management systems like Ghost (which my newsletter runs on!), and it's very powerful.

• Writing by @johackim tries to make it easier to write and format your next book directly from Obsidian; it's got goal tracking and a word counter, with export to pdf, epub, and mobi on the roadmap.

• New Bullet With Time by @Quorafind lets users auto add current time to new bullet line.

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

• Auto Glossary by @ennioitaliano automatically creates a file with an index, a glossary or both.

• SideToggleCommand by @0phoff adds more commands for a finer control of your obsidian sidebars.

• Smart Mentions by @Tobey-Jinc is an alternative to Obsidians default linked mentions view. Mentions are shown at the bottom center of the active note and ordered to give the most important notes first.

• QuranLookup by @abuibrahim2 is a Quran Lookup plugin for Obsidian. This replaces chapter:verse shorthand with verse text in Arabic and translation.

• DeepL by @friebetill allows translation of selected texts into more than 25 languages with DeepL.

• Emo by @yaleiyale allows you to automatically upload files pasted to Obsidian directly into your Github repository; it's mostly for image backups.

• Rapid Notes by @valteriomon makes it easier to create and place notes quickly in specific folders based on predefined prefixes.

• Dirtreeist by @k4a-l will render a directory Structure Diagram from a markdown lists in codeblock.

• Linter by @pjkaufman enforces consistent markdown styling.

• Chorded Hotkeys by @ConnorMeyers allows users to type multiple letters at the same time to trigger text insertion, template insertion, or command execution.

• Copy document as HTML by @mvdkwast makes it easier to copy your current document to clipboard as HTML, including images .

• Page Gallery by @tokenshift creates an embeddable gallery based on selected page contents.

• Obsidian GT Quote by @kokoromati makes it a bit quicker to paste text from the clipboard with a ">" appended to the beginning of the line.

• New Note New Window by @Pr0dt0s will generate a new file, just like the "Create new note" command, and put it in a new window.

• Bionic Reading by @Quorafind enables bionic reading mode in Live preview mode of Obsidian.

• Obsidian Sigma by @monesga makes it easier to use obsidian notes as calculation sheets.

Updates

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

• Database Folder 2.8.0 improved support for relational databases, got new formula functions, and improved the documentation.

• Longform has been updated to 2.0. It is a plugin that helps users write and edit novels, screenplays, and other long projects. There are a bunch of new features, check out the Readme for more information. Although migrating should happen automatically, here's a guide to migrating from 1.x to 2.0.

• Templater added syntax highlighting back, fixed a crash bug for big files, made tp.file.exists more reliable, and added improvements for vim users.

• Commander now has support for macros, added commands to the explorer pane, and merged the Advanced Mobile Toolbar into Commander.

• CardBoard 0.6.4 now has Dataview compatibility and improved fuzzy searching in the filter definition multi-select for board settings.

• Metadata Menu 0.3.3 added support for nested fileClasses and supercharged tags, field indexing performance improvement for large vaults, and some neat stuff surrounding bulk inserting of fields. 0.3.4 added formula fields to allow for automatic calculations. Here's a demo. Here's a tutorial for how to get the most out of super(charged)tags, with context for why you might want to, especially if you're coming from Notion. If you care about databases, check that tutorial out.

Betas

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

• Snippetor has been updated to generate snippets for Obsidian 1.0!

• The plugin update tracker lets you know when your installed plugins have updates available, and then view the release notes, download count, release time, and git diff. From there you can install some/all of the updates with a few clicks.

• Make.md adds spaces for drag and drop ordering of a vault, adds inline editing of embedded notes (inline editable transclusion) and editable view of an entire folder and menu shortcuts (/ in new line) and inline styler (select text) to style text without having to remember markdown.

• Here's a plugin to fetch emails from gmail.

Appearance

• Encore now has support for colour themes via the Style Settings plugin

• Cyber Glow Theme v7.5 got some visual fixes.

• Github theme 1.1.0 now supports light mode.

• Aura by @ashwinjadhav818 is new.

• deeper work by @lucas-fern is new.

• Mado Miniflow by @hydescarf got a total rewrite.

Ancillary Code

• Obsidian Tasks Calendar is a dataview snippet to show your calendar for the month or an agenda view. It can also create a widget view that would let you add a week view to your daily note.

Guides

• Here is a nice discussion of why a former Roam user likes Obsidian and how their daily-note / chronology based notetaking system works.

• @Sultanofswing recently wrote a 10,000 word academic paper in Obsidian using Zotero, the Zotero Integration plugin, and Pandoc. Here's the explanation of how in Discord.

• Nicole van der Hoeven made a video about how she uses Zsolt Viczian's LATCH (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy) method for organizing notes in Obsidian.

• Here's how to use embedded queries to simplify note management.

• There were a couple of discussions about different formats people use for home notes.

• Here's how one user used Obsidian and Anki to onboard better with a new job.

Showcases

• Kepano is using the Text Generator plugin to generate recipes and it immediately made me wonder whether AI will finally be able to take a list of ingredients I have in my pantry and just tell me what to cook.

• A bunch of people shared their favorite small features.

Courses

• Bianca Pereira launched her “Build Your Knowledge Portfolio” course. She teaches professional and amateurs researchers how to organize knowledge in a “no folders” system to support writing research-based content. Here's a 15% discount link.

Ancillary Tools

• Here's a guide for pairing Obsidian and Logseq.

• Acreom is now in 1.0 - like Logseq, it can run on top of an Obsidian vault, but unlike Logseq, it is not an outliner and doesn't involve bullet points. It can also sync your notes to the a browser version like GitHub hosted visual studio code, but without messing with Git. It's a more task management and calendar focused app than Obsidian is, but if you're looking for a straightforward way to get your plain text Obsidian notes into a browser for your work computer where you can work with them 🙃 it's less frustrating than most of the other options.

• Here's a tool for batch converting Daylio entries (a journaling & mood tracking app) into Markdown notes.