🌠 Weekly Reviews, Zen Mode, & Aggregation

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!

• r/ObsidianMD now has 50,000 members 🤯 Here is a fun discussion about the growth of the community, complete with a graph.
• Obsidian has playlists on youtube, including resources for Obsidian for PhDs, university, and plugin building.

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.

• Obsidian Handlebars Template Plugin by @sbquinlan  adds support for handlebars template blocks in notes.
• Dirtreeist by @k4a-l  renders a directory Structure Diagram from markdown lists in codeblocks.
• Chorded Hotkeys by @ConnorMeyers  lets users type multiple letters at the same time to trigger text insertion, template insertion, or command execution.

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.

• AI Text Generator by @samyosm  lets users generate text from a prompt using the GPT-3 API.
• Obsidian S3 by @TechTheAwesome  allows for storage and retrieval of media attachments on S3 compatible services.
• Weekly Review by @brandonkboswell  opens all of the files you have created in the last week.
• Autoscroll by @petr-nazarov  automatically scrolls down content with a provided speed.
• External Link Helper by @nakalsio  makes entering external links easier.
• Tray by @dragonwocky  will let users launch Obsidian on startup and run it in the background from the system tray.
• Aggregator by @Seraphli  helps users gather information from files, and make a summary in the file.
• ProZen by @cmoskvitin  expands the current tab to full screen, removing everything but content.
• Todo sort by @ryangomba  sorts todos by completion status.
• MathJax WikiLinks by @aaron-jack-manning  allows rendering MathJax in WikiLink aliases.
• Link Opener by @zorazrr  lets users open external links within Obsidian.

Updates

• QuickAdd got a big rewrite with a ton of bug fixes, as well as some new documentation.
• Strange New Worlds popups will now by default get cut off at 100 files, although the number can be controlled in settings. This should improve speed.
• Metadata Menu 0.3.7 got a bunch of improvements related to Fileclass views, with a demo video.
• Frontmatter Links: v1.2.5 lets users add front matter links to the graph, works on mobile, and got some styling improvements.
• Obsidian Front Matter Title 2.6.0 added alias and suggest features.
• the Obsidian Chat View Plugin now supports markdown and HTML rendering.
• Another Quick Switcher 7.5.0 lets users search links.
• Excalidraw 1.8 added a function to OCR written text

For Developers

• The PDF indexing and OCR for images features of Omnisearch have been published as a reusable library.

Appearance

• The Github Theme added Protanopia, Tritanopia & Deuteranopia color variants in Style Settings.
• Adwaita by @birneee  should make Obsidian look more native on Gnome Desktop Environments like on Ubuntu or Fedora.
• Material Ocean by @dragonwocky is a new dark theme that combines navy blue undertones with pastel highlights.
• WY Console by @Satchelmouth is based on Computer Consoles in popular 80s Sci-fi films

Guides

• Bryan Jenks put together a new guide for using Obsidian and Zotero 6 to write research papers.
• Here's how to use Dataview to aggregate weekly notes.
• Nicole van der Hoeven has a new video about how notes are only useful if you use them with some tips on how to do that.
• Here's how to use system commands (best in Linux and Mac) to manipulate text, configure Obsidian, and do other templatey things, via Gareth Stretton.

Discussions

• Sébastien Dubois' article about why to take and make notes sparked an interesting discussion on HackerNews.

Showcases

• Here's a neat way to handwrite on a tablet to get bullet journal style notes in Obsidian.

Housekeeping

Thursday was Thanksgiving here in the USA, but my family is celebrating today. I wanted to take a moment and let you all know how deeply grateful I am for the opportunities that have come my way because of you. I'm planning to quit teaching soon, for health reasons I'll get into more detail about once the dust has settled, but it wouldn't be possible without all of your support, financial and otherwise.