🌠 An academic vault tour & weekly review templates

In The Community

• Here's a curated list of 360+ bookmarks related to Obsidian maintained by @oldtowneast and shared over at the new pkm.social mastodon instance.

Obsidian Updates

It's been awhile since the last Obsidian update, and traditionally there are a bunch of people secretly worrying that this means the app is dead, no more updates are coming, the team has stopped production, etc. 😅 so I just wanted to put a little note here and remind everybody that before mobile and live preview went live, there was also a gap of a month or two between updates.

If you're curious what's being worked on, you can check out the roadmap – it looks like metadata improvements and a core canvas plugin are the next big things to expect.

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.

• Omnisearch by @scambier  uses a smart weighting algorithm to show more relevant results.
• Rapid Notes by @valteriomon  lets users create and place notes quickly in specific folders based on predefined prefixes.

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.

• D2 by @berniexie adds functionality for a diagram scripting language that turns text to diagrams.
• Crumbs by @tgrosinger is a new alternative to Breadcrumbs that seems more focused on Dendron-style dot hierarchies.
• Copy Note URL by @juliuszfedyk  lets users copy a note's URL based on a predefined domain and file extension.
• evergreen by @zk4  is similar to the "no dupe leaves" plugin in that it will automatically switch the focus to open notes instead of reopening them, but works with stacked tabs.
• Chord Lyrics by @nevernotmove  will display chord names over lyrics. Supports line wrapping, section headers and auto-detection.
• Surfing by @Quorafind  makes it easier to browse the web within Obsidian.
• Text Dataset Aid Plugin by @conneroisu  makes fine-tuning datasets for language models a lot easier, which allows for increased accuracy, better style, more control, increased flexibility, etc. in text prediction/generation.
• Obsidian Stylist by @ixth  makes it easier to add classes and styles on markdown blocks.

Updates

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

• Tasks can now explain what your queries are doing.
• CardBoard now honors the RTL editor settings and got some tag-related improvements.
• Commander has startup macros for running commands on startup, color-coding, and other bug fixes.
• RPG Manager v3.4 changed how elements are identified, allows Scenes / Acts / Sessions / Adventures to be reorganised by a simple drag-and-drop. It also saves all the relationships at the bottom of the note, which helps with the graph view.
• Database Folder 3.0.0 got a design refresh, configurable shortcuts, improved display options, and mobile pagination.

Ancillary Code

• Here's how to use callouts that render like infoboxes or capacities-like sidebars.

Guides

• Here's a new beginner's guide to using Obsidian for role playing games.
• Here's a quick tip for getting straight quotes when curly quotes are turned on shared on the new pkm.social mastodon instance.
• Here's a weekly review template with useful icons, modelled on the Plus Minus Next method and set up for a complete year. It's very detailed and looks lovely.

Discussions

• Casual reminder that you should be backing up your notes.
• Reddit hosted a great discussion about different ways to save quotes from books and organize them.
• Many people find that daily journaling is valuable.

Showcases

• Danny Hatcher hosted @pseudometa for a vault showcase on youtube, focused on the academic use-case and using recent files, dataview, breadcrumbs, and outline for navigation.
• Juanchi Parra had a great showcase of the usefulness of the list view mode of the Full Calendar plugin in Discord.
• @Thomsen in Discord also shared a really nice film project dashboard.
• I also really enjoyed this example of using Dataview & Buttons to create an index of scientists.
• Here's a nice diagram of a media workflow via  u/Abides1948 on Reddit.
• Here's an example of how to use Excalidraw for character profiles.

Ancillary Tools

• py-obsidianmd is a python library that enables you to batch change note metadata and move metadata between YAML and inline styles. There's a video explanation along with examples.

Housekeeping

My birthday is this weekend. Look at the pretty new desktop tower holder my husband installed for me to celebrate:

If you have any hot tips for cable management, consider joining the discussion in Discord, pinging me on social media, leaving a comment, or sending me an email.