• The Apply Patterns plugin lets users search & replace with regex. Ben Hamilton is trying to encourage users to create a gallery of patterns to help users understand the value; if you have something to contribute, please consider adding your own examples.
• Some folks on Reddit are trying to collect printable learning guides for Obsidian and markdown.
• We just passed the 500 plugin mark! Thank you to all the wonderful developers who have helped build the Obsidian ecosystem.

Hub

The Obsidian Hub is a community knowledge base designed to help organize information about the Obsidian ecosystem. It's an excellent companion to this Roundup, which tends to be very chronological in nature. Here are some of the recent updates:

• There's a new index for spaced repetition plugins.
• Here's a new overview about pitfalls of using Obsidian for protected health information
• Here's a really helpful introduction to dataview.
• There's a new iOS Shortcuts index.

If you'd like to help out with the project, check out the good first issue tasks or, for example, search the Roundup archives for "iOS shortcuts" and add them to the index above.

Obsidian Updates

• Obsidian got a major update from Electron 13 to 16, please grab the latest installer from the website, not just in the app. Insider builds were mostly bugfixes, but you can check the release notes on the forum.

Plugin News

New in Community Plugins

A bunch of plugins went through code review and are now available in Obsidian's plugin list. Licat had a busy week! Here are some highlights, but for the full list, check out the plugin stats page.

• Extract PDF Annotations by @munach extracts PDF Annotations (Notes and Highlights) and sorts them by topics
• File Cleaner by @Johnson0907 helps you to clean empty files in the vault.
• Kindle by @SimeonLukas lets users send .md files as .mobi to Kindle.
• Steemit by @anpigon helps with publishing Obsidian documents to Steemit, a blockchain-based blogging and social media website.
• Text Generator by @nhaouari uses OpenAI to "finish" texts based on inputs. Here are some examples.
• Full Calendar by @davish lets you create a "proper" calendar in Obsidian, complete with connections to your notes.
• Digital Garden by @oleeskild is a new third party publish option with a handy guide. It supports transclusions, code blocks, admonitions, and footnotes.
• Remember File State by @ludovicchabant remembers your cursor position, selection, and scroll location after you navigate away.
• Todoist Text by @wesmoncrief integrates Todoist tasks with markdown checkboxes.

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.

• Novel word count by @isaaclyman displays a word or page count for each file, folder and vault in the file pane. I was surprised how useful I found this for deciding what to work on next.
• Card View Switcher by @qawatake is an alternate quick switcher that has a card view so users have more context when searching files.

Updates

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

• Settings Search can now open directly to the setting you searched for, instead of just the plugin that has the setting.
• Banners now supports Live Preview. You can also lock banners in place.
• Icon Shortcode v0.8.3 supports the new icon packs, live preview, and loads faster.
• Smart Typography, Indentation Guides, and LanguageTool now have mobile support.
• The Backend for Sekund is now open source. If you're interested in how to use it, contact the developer.

Betas

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

• Hover Editor enhances the core Page Preview plugin by turning the popover into a fully functional editor instance which can be dragged, resized, and pinned to the workspace. It is incredible.
• Here's a way to access the Obsidian Sync version history over the command palette/with a hotkey. The dev isn't likely to submit to the community list, but it would be wonderful if someone could figure out how to add it to the Hotkeys++ plugin as a pull request...

Appearance

• Primary got some nice bugfixes and redesigned panes.
• Willemstad added support for the Full Calendar plugin, and improvements to a bunch of modals and panes.
• Cardstock now has a dark mode option.

Guides

• Here's a guide on how to do card-based writing outlines using the Kanban plugin, with a good overview of the benefits and limitations.
• Tracy Winchell wrote a tutorial and a template to demonstrate how the "note to next day self" journaling technique works.

Discussions

• I participated in a great discussion about why taking notes on messy concepts like "democracy" and "oligarchy" and "Phoenician identity" can be difficult, and how very specific notes focused on the questions and problem spaces can help. You can listen to the recording if you're interested in learning more about history timelines & the difficulties of classification.
• Here's a handy discussion about best practices for iCloud on Windows to help troubleshoot slow loading and other problems.
• Here's a discussion about using Obsidian for cybersecurity work.
• Here's a discussion about the limitations of Obsidian as a team wiki.
• Here's a pretty good discussion about practical ways to use tags and the struggle to create a good tagging taxonomy.
• Here's a discussion about different ways to manage a glossary in Obsidian.
• Here was a good one about how to denote ideas you disagree with in your notes.

Events

• Nick Milo will be giving a presentation called The Joy of Thinking and the Rise of the Note Maker as part of Tiago Forte's free, virtual Second Brain Summit. The Summit is March 14-18. Nick's presentation will be Fri, March 18 at 12 pm ET. Dan from Readwise will also be presenting on Wed, March 16 at 12 pm ET.

Knowledge Management

• An archivist wrote a guide for a simple way to categorize things in your vault that is designed to grow in complexity as your notes do.
• Here's a neat visual for how to track team interests.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a QuickAdd macro that pulls in github issues from a github repository specified in the gh-repo frontmatter on the current file and formats them in a list.

Ancillary Tools

• The Sample is my favorite way to find niche, high-quality newsletters written by real people. They just added a neat new feature; now instead of just getting one algorithmically selected newsletter in your inbox each morning, they have a "show a random newsletter" page where you can get on-demand recommendations.

In The Wild

• The Obsidian Icon was spotted at the Apple Event.

Housekeeping

Last week's Roundup got emailed to over 4,000 people. When I originally started this project, I only thought about 30 of the most active people hanging out in Discord would read it — and even then, I assumed it would only get used for catching up after things like illnesses and vacations.

Knowing that so many of you get so much value out of the Roundup is incredibly motivating. Thank you all for your kind words, encouragement, and support 💚

Next Thursday is the third Thursday of the month, which means I'll be sending a new supporters-only article. Continuing my theme of pushing back against popular wisdom, this month the topic is the value of creating an index of quality resources, even if you never have time to read them.

• I'm going to be joining researcher Bianca Pereira (of Linking Your Thinking) for a Twitter Spaces event about tracking history timelines, i.e. how to take research notes on concepts and ideas that change across time, aren't necessarily bounded by space, and vary by perspective. Stuff like social identity and geopolitical changes can be tricky to classify neatly. Join us Sunday, March 6 at 11am EST.
• 400+ people on the Obsidian subreddit voted about whether they use folders to organize their vault (not including things like templates, attachments, and plugin stuff). The answer was pretty much "yes."

Obsidian Updates

• Publish sites now support viewing the global graph. It can be opened using the button on the top right of the graph, next to the expand button. You can check it out on the Obsidian Hub & contrast with my public notes (which were recently updated).

In addition to the normal bugfixes, Desktop Insider v0.13.27:

• Added new "Cycle bullet/checkbox" command that cycles between regular bullet, checkbox, and checked checkbox.
• Reduced chance of Obsidian Sync overwriting instead of merging when a rare race condition happens.

Plugin News

New

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.

• Creases by @liamcain provides tools for efficiently folding markdown sections in Obsidian and has a really fun README; it's worth checking out just for the chance to smile at all the puns.
• Footnote Shortcut by @MichaBrugger lets users insert and write footnotes faster thanks to some fancy automations and hotkeys.
• Full Calendar 0.5.0 by @davish supports one-way sync for any calendar in .ics format, which includes private Google calendars, iCloud calendars, and most public calendars on the web. The plugin now uses Obsidian's CSS variables to accommodate theming. It also works on mobile.
• Daily notes new tab by @reorx adds command and sidebar button to open daily notes in new tab.
• Text Generator by @nhaouari is a handy plugin for Obsidian that helps you generate text content using GPT-3 (OpenAI).
• Task Planner by @eoghano4321 is a new task planning plugin.
• Markdown Table Editor by @ganesshkumar provides an editor for Markdown tables. It can open CSV, Microsoft Excel/Google Sheets data as Markdown tables from Obsidian Markdown editor.
• Key Sequence Shortcut by @anselmwang lets users execute commands with short key sequences. For example, tp for 'Toggle Preview' and tb for 'Toggle Sidebar'.
• Kobo Highlights Importer by @bitwiseops lets users import highlights from Kobo devices.

Updates

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

• The developer of the Excalidraw plugin set up donation tiers; the highest tier will get access to quarterly community meetings on Zoom about the future of the plugin. There's also a new tools panel to make it easier to access Excalidraw commands and scripts on mobile.
• Admonitions v7.0.0 has a few breaking changes; it now supports Microsoft Document Syntax instead of Python style. There are also now icon packs, as well as a bunch of pdf-related bugfixes.
• Another Quick Switcher v.4.4.0 added a "show aliases on top" option.
• The PlantUML diagramming plugin lets users edit .puml files directly and link to notes in them.
• 0.3.1 of remotely-save allows syncing deletion operations which means users no longer need to manually delete files from all devices.

Betas

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

• the Query Control plugin lets you render search results which means checkboxes look "checked" in the search panel instead of being plain text. Since it had a rename (used to be Embedded Query Control) you might need to uninstall the old version and restart first.

For Developers

• The developer of a solution for writing in tree structure for long form writing is in Ukraine and looking for help to polish up and publish the plugin. It's almost ready to go, just needs some documentation and maybe a couple of bugfixes. Contact Santi Younger to get involved.
• Someone on the forum is looking to sponsor (i.e. pay for) an open source plugin to export the whole vault as a pdf. I will note that I would personally be very grateful if it also supported epub or mobi, if anyone is interested in picking it up. Among other things, it would make it easier to bundle the contents of your vault up and send to tools like BundleIQ (an AI assistant).

As of Desktop Insider v0.13.27:

• There is a new deleted event on MetadataCache now.
• DataAdapter.stat now returns the OS mtime and ctime for folders.
• Obsidian’s icon library now supports all icons from lucide, a currently maintained fork of feather-icons with 547 supported icons. No need to import feather-icons anymore.

Feature Requests

• It would be neat if Obsidian Publish could "pull down" updates from a github repository like static site generators do, to help make it easier to keep collaborative vaults like the Obsidian Hub up to date without requiring one individual to handle everything. If you have a use-case for this, please add your situation to the replies.

Appearance

• Minimal has its own website with detailed documentation. Version 5.1.7 has support for the Charts and Metatable plugins as well as some new style settings.
• Primary now has support for alternative checkboxes. There are also new tab header styling options. I use Primary on my iPad and the new checkboxes are really cute!
• Willemstad now supports Minimal-style Cards and Image Grids. There are also a bunch of new Style Settings options.

Guides

• Here's a new css-based method of creating simple dashboards that leverage horizontal space.
• Here's a comprehensive writeup of someone's system for using Obsidian as a project manager.
• Here's is an incredibly detailed, flexible, and well-explained guide for transitioning to Obsidian from Roam.
• Here is a collection of Chinese-language guides and tutorials for Obsidian.
• Here's a nice explanation of how to use daily notes and dataview's task queries.
• Episode 20 of Practically Paperless discusses practical uses of the dataview plugin.
• The hub has a great new guide for how to debug why Obsidian is running slowly.

Discussions

• Here's a discussion about various ways to replicate the Scrivener corkboard view in Obsidian.
• Here's one about using Obsidian to manage gardening notes.
• Here was a discussion about how Obsidian can be helpful during political crises.
• Here's a really insightful discussion about using Obsidian for thematic analysis and what other tools might be better at certain aspects of that.
• Here was a nice discussion in Discord about what sorts of things to take notes on in lectures — the main suggestion was to take notes on your reactions to content, not just the content itself.

Knowledge Management

• Here's a video that provides an alternative to the fleeting/literature/permanent note paradigm.
• Here's an article about information architecture for personal knowledge management that discusses labeling concepts.

Examples

• Here are some really beautiful note templates for periodic notes. .
• Here's a task management system with a sample vault available for download.

Ancillary Tools

• There's a new custom icon for Mac.
• The Obsidian To Mkdocs python script for publishing has more options and an updated README.

Obsidian Updates

Obsidian Mobile v1.1.0 is now available for public access! This includes all new functionality and bug fixes up to Obsidian Desktop v0.13.24, which means Live Preview works on mobile now. So does vim, but only do that if you have a keyboard attached to your device.

If you run into any problems trying to edit things like code blocks, you can get back into source mode by long-holding the 3 dot button on the top right and hitting "Toggle Live Preview/Source mode" (or run a command from the pull down menu or bottom toolbar).

Plugin News

New in Community Plugins

• Sekund is a social network that lets users share notes and collaborate with others using Obsidian. Here are directions for how to use it, but I'm most impressed by the commenting features.
• Hotkeys Chords by @trenta3 lets users tie Emacs-like keybinding sequences such as C-x C-s to any available Obsidian command. "Hotkey chords" are basically a sequence of hotkeys.
• Living Graph by @geoffreysflaminglasersword animates the graph so it does a fun little dance.
• Digital Garden by @oleeskild is one of the easiest free ways to publish your notes to a digital garden that I've seen.

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.

Updates

• Better Word Count got fixed! Yay! Only update if you use Live Preview mode, though, the dev is still working on adding support for the legacy editor. Please read the Readme for an explanation; it had to be entirely rewritten.
• Snippet Manager v2.3.1 lets users download and update a particular snippet.
• Divide & Conquer now has support for bulk disabling of CSS snippets to help with troubleshooting.
• Various Complements v5.6.0 suggests and completes the text with front matter properties only when the cursor is in the front matter.
• File Tree Alternative now supports Folder Note functionality, with or without the Folder Note plugin.
• Tabout now works in live preview. It lets users hit "tab" to move the cursor outside of markdown formatting.
• Excalidraw 1.6.13 brings improved handling of saving & sync. You can also compress Excalidraw JSON to keep it from cluttering search results. v1.6.14 lets users search for text elements.
• Initiative Tracker v7.2.0 has support for multiple parties, custom status effects, and auto updates for player stats.
• As of 2.0.9, Image in Editor works on mobile.
• The Rest API plugin added new /search/ endpoints.
• Tweet to Markdown added toggles to customize tweet downloads: date, frontmatter, etc
• Orthography, a spellchecker plugin, added support for Grammarly.

Betas

• v0.2.0 of Full Calendar now has read-only views of Google Calendar, and multiple calendar colors with configurable colors.
• Graphvidian is an Obsidian plugin to generate hierarchical graphs, with the nodes are from your Obsidian vault. It works by converting a breadcrumbs database into a format Graphvis can use. Here's the overview and proposal about the problems it solves. I really need to get off my butt and set up a proper Breadcrumbs hierarchy for my notes so I can use this.
• Quick Jump is a port of the Jump to Link plugin that works in Live Preview.

For Developers

• The Spaced Repetition Plugin has a ton of users and a bunch of open issues looking for feature enhancements. It also has many contributors, so if you were looking for a project where you can help out but not have to take over maintenance of a whole codebase yourself, this seems like a good candidate. The developer is particularly looking for translation help.
• The Hub now features an automatically generated list of relatively straightforward problems developers in the community are looking for help with, thanks to @joethei. Here's one for styling checkboxes in the editor view for the Tasks plugin, and another for how to fix emojis messing up table alignments.

Feature Requests

• I was actually surprised to realize this wasn't in core, but it would be nice if you could "make a copy" of a folder and all its contents the same way you can a file, without having to navigate into your filesystem.
• Here is a really neat idea to allow exporting your entire vault into book format. Bonus points if it can algorithmically decide which notes should be batched together.
• Here's a really neat idea about scoped vaults to build out the functionality of nested vaults in a more robust, useful way.
• It would be nice if we could sort plugins by enabled status (among other sorting mechanisms).
• Imagine the performance improvements that could come from being able to toggle plugins on with a hotkey, only when you need them.
• Some folks would like to access Obsidian trash from within the app.

Appearance

If you're on the Insider build you should probably update your themes; several were tweaked to accommodate a new change.

• Obsidian You got a big redesign to comply with Google's Material Design standards and now supports live preview. Android users should definitely check it out.
• Minimal 5.1.6 added some support for the Tracker plugin, the ability to add outlines to images, and got some bugfixes and other small improvements.
• Willemstad X v0.1.3 got a bunch of really incredible table support for Live Preview. Admonitions look the same in Live Preview and Reading modes.
• The Dataview cards from the "Notion Inspired Color Scheme" from the ITS theme are available as a snippet.

Guides

• Here's a guide for how to use the BRAT plugin to auto-update your themes, switch active themes without digging through your settings, and more!
• Here's a really interesting demonstration of how to use the kanban plugin to do course outlining.
• Here's a detailed guide for how to improve startup time by keeping non-critical plugins from loading immediately and blocking launch. I would honestly love this to be a plugin that lets us toggle which plugins we want to load at startup or delayed start in the settings page.
• Here's a nice guide about using Obsidian to do a weekly review.

Discussions

• Here's a thought-provoking Discord discussion about the relationship between personal knowledge management and fear of death.
• Bianca Pereira and Nick Milo did an event on Twitter Spaces about using PKM for research: PKM mindsets yesterday; there's a recording and it's transcribed. I'll be joining Bianca next week on Sunday, March 6 at 11:00 AM EST to discuss stuff like why it's hard to take notes on timelines.
• Here's one about taking notes in multiple languages.
• Here's a neat way to apply custom styling to metadata that was shared in Discord.

Knowledge Management

• Here's an article about the value of linked data.
• Here's how to apply information architecture concepts to personal knowledge management

Ancillary Tools

• the MarkDownload browser extension added support for MathJax to LaTeX, some extra keyboard shortcuts, downloading images as Base64 embedded urls (!), and more. The full release notes are worth a read.
• iDoRecall is a nifty freemium Anki alternative for creating spaced repetition flashcards. It's designed to be a bit more social, more tightly integrated into the learning materials (they have a browser extension for highlighting), and is meant to be easier to use than Anki. They're interested in developing an Obsidian plugin, and when I mentioned I planned to include it in the Roundup, they created a 20% off coupon code that'll be good until March: ObsidianCommunity20
• Elicit is the best implementation of machine learning + natural language search of academic databases I've ever personally seen and as far as I can tell it's free. One of the developers happens to be an Obsidian user, and is active in Discord.

• The developer of Buttons is hoping for user feedback about feature prioritization for the plugin.

Obsidian Updates

Insider build v0.13.25 included a bunch of fixes and also:

• Clicking on links in Live Preview will now open them directly.
• Embedding list items will now show any sub list items when rendering.
• Embeds to files that don't yet exist will automatically load the file once it's created. This avoids issues with images that syncs in after opening the note it was embedded in.
• Word count now properly counts apostrophes.
• Renamed "Swap line up/down" commands to "Move line up/down".

For Obsidian Publish:

• Now has an option to hide page title headings.
• Fixed double scrollbar in hover page preview
• Viewers using macOS and iOS will now get native scrollbars
• Frontmatter aliases can now be used to redirect broken links to new content.

Plugin News

New in Community Plugins

These plugins went through code review and are now available in Obsidian's plugin list.

• Word Splitting for Japanese in Edit Mode by @sonarAIT  helps Obsidian support Japanese word splitting.
• Settings Search by @valentine195  lets users globally search settings.  You can even open plugin settings (both core and community) directly from the search results.
• Insert Heading Link by @Signynt  lets users add a link to a heading.
• Auto Note Mover by @farux  will automatically move the active notes to their respective folders according to the rules.
• Persistent Graph by @Sanqui  adds commands to save and restore the positions of nodes on the global graph view.

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.

• Advanced Selection by @anselmwang  offers more flexible ways to select text in the editor.
• Things Link by @gavinmn  makes it easier to  link an Obsidian Note to a Things Project.
• Command Palette-- by @qawatake  is the command palette without unwanted commands
• Path Title by @jdeal  adds the path (or optional replacement) to the filename title of each pane.

Updates

• Obsidian Fantasy Calendar now supports repeating events, leap days, and support for importing events created with the Timelines plugin. It also got a huge performance update.
• @AidenLx created a version of Alx Folder Note without folderv, which should help it load faster on mobile.
• Various Complements  v5.3.0 added a Open source file key option and an option to include only files under current directory option on current vault complement.
• Excalidraw 1.6.8 has tray-mode & customizable color palettes. Here's a demo.
• Block Reference Count now has a bunch of toggles, and fixed a bug with tables in Live Preview.
• Codeblock Completer now has templates
• Breadcrumbs now has a dedicated documentation site and an API.
• Hider  v1.1.1 added setting to hide vault name in file navigator.
• Snippetor added a slider to control checkbox roundness and has a fix for Blue Topaz theme.

Betas

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

• Embedded Query Control adds controls to all inline queries (in live preview and reading modes) that let you collapse, sort, enable context, copy, hide the title, and hide the results.
• Full Calendar replicates the core functionality and appearance of Google Calendar. GCal sync support and task management are on the roadmap, but for now it already handles click-and-drag to create and edit events. Here's a blog post from the developer explaining why they like to use Obsidian, which kicks off a whole series about their workflow.
• Zotero plugin and Zotero Obsidian Note are still in alpha phase and won't be available to public soon, but the developer is looking for help and did post it, so I'm sharing it with y'all.
• There's a new  proof of concept plugin for using https://liveblocks.io/ in obsidian. It would allow for a collaborative editing experience similar to google docs. If anyone is interested in working on this, or taking the poc further please reach out to the dev — they could use help on the codemirror parts 🙂
• Markdown Commands (not to be confused with "extra markdown commands") acts like a text expander so that you can enter commands like >todo to get the markdown - [ ] if you forget, which is handy for things like markdown tables, which suck to remember the formatting for.

For Developers

• @esm90 is looking for someone to take over maintenance of the Vimrc plugin.
• @ifthenelsa is a technical writer volunteering to help write "getting started" documentation for plugins to help lower the barrier to entry for use by non-technical users. Here's more information in Discord.
• Note that the new Codemirror editor has received an upgrade where previous ​ characters, used as placeholders for computing cursor positions, have been switched to 0-width elements. Licat & Silver recommend double-checking that your theme does not contain global img { ... } CSS rules to avoid breaking the editor.
• TFile.unsafeCachedData has been removed and is now stored in a private inaccessible WeakMap to avoid accidental use of this unsafe data.
• There is now a new requestUrl API function that returns an object with the http response status, headers, as well as getters for arrayBuffer, json, and text. This is a more advanced version of the request API. (Requires API version 0.13.25)
• The request and the new requestUrl functions can now accept a body of type ArrayBuffer.
• Also, here's a discussion about how and why to reduce plugin load time.

Feature Requests

• It would be cool if we could create a graph view based on folder structure, with link connections being superimposed on top of it without impacting node positions.

Appearance

• Ebullientworks 0.3.16 has cssclass support for tables to force-wrap and word-wrap, and more color support.
• Primary v1.2.0 now has Style Settings support.
• Willemstad by @tingmelvin   added support for the footnote indicator plugin and got some style settings options. It also has a bunch of improvements to tables and other features.
• Royal Velvet by @caro401 exists now.
• Minimal 5.1.3 got some fixes and new style settings options: can now change the highlighted text background color and bold text weight. 5.1.4 adds the Atom color scheme. 5.1.5 added some fixes for footnotes and narrow panes.
• The very colorful Sparkling Wisdom theme got some more gradients and improved visibility.
• ITS Theme restyles Dataview & Kanban plugins to mimic Notions Board and Gallery views and got a dvl-c cssclass inspired by Minimal to style only dataview lists and tables as Notion Cards.

Small Tips

• You can use the MetaEdit plugin to quickly add tags to all files within a folder.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a quick entry GUI to add entries to your Obsidian daily note even if Obsidian isn't open. It's written in python.
• Here's a new way to generate a static site from your Obsidian files.
• Here's a Templater script that will "clean" selected text from within Obsidian into a friendlier format; it removes square brackets from page links, leave only alias from links, extracts URLs from markdown links, structures bulleted lists to match Microsoft formatting and removes Obsidian tags from the text.
• Here's a dynamically created filter menu for dataview tables.

Guides

• Here's a new write-up about how to convert OneNote notes to markdown suitable for Obsidian.
• Here's a tutorial for folder notes (the original version, not Aiden's).
• HYPERUNIVERSITY has curated resources for contemporary digital tools and training in computer skills aimed at students and scholars in the humanities. It's basically an index of useful guides.
• Here's a comprehensive guide to using markdown, R, git, and other software relevant for the social sciences.
• Here's a 20-minute video guide on how to use Obsidian for open-source intelligence work (OSINT) along with some templates. The creator also has a course available for pre-order.
• Here's a guide for how to manage projects and goals from the developer of QuickAdd. It uses Minimal, Contextual Typography, Dataview, QuickAdd, Kanban, and MetaEdit. Christian also included a demo vault.
• Here's another guide on how to use git for syncing with Android.

Discussions

• Here's a discussion about various ways people use Obsidian for work.
• Here's one about using Obsidian for school (mostly computer science & med school, but lots of great advice that's broadly applicable).

Knowledge Management

• My article about the value of consistent naming conventions went live on Thursday to financial supporters, one of whom shared this excellent article about the importance of being smart about naming your files — especially when you have nearly 50,000 files to sort through after a fruitful career as a knowledge worker.

Ancillary Tools

• Glasp is a social highlighting & annotating tool that lets you extract highlights (& annotations) from web articles and send them Obsidian. Here's a guide, but as far as I can tell, it's not automatic like the Readwise plugin, but does export to markdown and is designed with Obsidian users in mind. It's free but as far as I know there's no way to keep your highlights/annotations private, so that's the trade-off.
• Ernie at Tedium decided to try self-hosting his own cloud setup and then wound up going with Syncthing, but I enjoyed his explanation of why and what Syncthing is good at. Syncthing is pretty popular in the Obsidian community but this is a pretty good explanation of why people like it.

Housekeeping

• I've been doing one-on-one meetings on Zoom to help people with Obsidian-related questions for a little over two weeks now. I'm extremely pleased to say that it's been going well: I genuinely do believe that I've helped everyone I've spoken with, and the "pay what you can afford / what you think my time & help help was worth" model is going pretty well, I think.
• As mentioned last week, I increased the price of the Roundup's "exclusive offerings" (I hate that phrase; I prefer to think of them as a "thank you" to financial supporters). I settled on $4/mo or $44/year. This will not impact current supporters; if you're able to see The Value of Consistent Naming Conventions when you log in (or got it as an email on Thursday), you're good to go (unless you want to switch plans, in which case push the "membership" button floating in the bottom right, you'll need to enable javascript if you have that turned off).
• Next month's exclusive article will be about creating mental shifts to lower stress and improve productivity. I promise it's not as hokey as it sounds.
• Some folks asked, so: as things stand, the Roundup has to have about twice as many subscribers as it currently does to support me enough for me to quit teaching when my leave ends. It would have to grow by about 5x to replace my teaching income. Or I guess I could try to figure some kind of ad thing but, ugh, I'd rather not.
• But! If my consulting work continues at its current rate (I have no idea if this is likely), I'll be able to afford to stay home and continue doing Obsidian community work at my current level even at the current numbers. I'm really hoping that this will all be sustainable for me, and I appreciate everyone's support 💚

• Here's a (very) short feedback survey for the Workspaces Plus plugin in Obsidian.

Obsidian Updates

• Desktop Insider 0.13.24 upgraded the engine from Electron 13 to 16, so download the latest intaller (grab the link from the pins in Discord). This version improved the behavior of Obsidian Sync so that you're less likely to run into weird conflicts from old devices having stored versions. There were also a bunch of small fixes.
• Desktop Insider 1.1.0 (Build 38) brings mobile up to parity with desktop 0.13.24. Licat also mentioned that they're working on getting mobile out to public, just waiting on the approval process to take its sweet time. If you're impatient for Live Preview on mobile, remember you can always buy an Insider license :)

Plugin News

New in Community Plugins

These plugins went through code review and are now available in Obsidian's plugin list.

• Excel to Markdown Table by @ganesshkumar will paste data from Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers and LibreOffice Calc as properly formatted Markdown tables.
• Save as Gist by @ghedamat saves the current note as Gist on github, which his handy for easily sharing your templates & dataviewjs queries and such. It also makes it super easy to share one-off notes!
• Multi-Column Markdown by @ckRobinson adds functionality to create markdown documents with multiple columns of content viewable within Obsidian's preview mode.
• Topic Linking by @liammagee converts PDF files and web links to Markdown.
• File Info Panel by @CattailNu is a plugin for Obsidian that creates a File Information view that displays the active file's date created, date modified, file size, and links to open the file in its native application and to open the file's folder. It also has writing statistics (character, word, sentence, and paragraph counts) and a word frequency analysis. It is amazingly useful for writers of any kind.
• Power Search by @aviral-batra searches Anki Notes based on your current line
• Code Block Labels by @stbowers adds labels to fenced code blocks
• Local REST API by @coddingtonbear lets users get, change or otherwise interact with your notes in Obsidian via a REST API.
• Simple note quiz by @dorisxx starts a simple quiz on your current note
• Frontmatter Tag Suggest by @jmilldotdev autocompletes tags in the frontmatter tags field
• Better Command Palette by @AlexBieg
• Copy as HTML by @jenningsb2 converts selected markdown to HTML and copies it to the clipboard.
• Core Search Assistant by @qawatake enhances built-in search with a better keyboard interface, card previews, and bigger preview. If that sounds appealing, make sure you also check out the Vantage plugin, which helps you build complex queries using Obsidian's native search tools in a user-friendly graphical way.

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.

• Settings Search by @valentine195 lets users globally search settings in Obsidian.md
• Sidekick by @hadynz suggests new connections by highlighting text that could match existing links and tags
• Front Matter Tag Wizard by @Tohsig adds tag autocompletion and optional autoformatting to note front matter.
• Insert Heading Link by @Signynt
• Auto Note Mover by @farux will automatically move the active notes to their respective folders according to the rules.
• Persistent Graph by @Sanqui adds commands to save and restore the positions of nodes on the global graph view.
• Todoist Text by @wesmoncrief integrates your Todoist tasks with markdown checkboxes.

Updates

• Excalidraw 1.6.1 improved freedraw flow, and includes a fix for iPad scribble. It should now be even easier to create links to drawings, and build a vault of interconnected sketches.
• Using the new Style Settings plugin support in Supercharged Links, you can now customize your note links without a single line of CSS. Here's a discussion of why that can be useful.
• Block Reference Counter has been updated to support showing references in Live Preview
• BRAT got some updates and fixes most around how notifications work.
• MetaEdit 1.7.2 got some fixes so it should stop conflicting with Kanban and Excalidraw.
• Linter 1.2.10 has a new rule so that the first H1 is inserted as the title attribute. If not found, inserts the filename.
• v1.8.0 of Obsidian-Memos supports sharing images with backgrounds, using shift to select days on a heatmap, customizing composition, custom filenames for the DELETE and QUERY files, and showing all tags from the vault. It also has translations for French & Portuguese.
• Various Complements v5.1.0 added regex patterns, better handling of whitespace, a status bar, and better suggests for aliases. 5.3.0 has an open source file key option.
• Smarter Markdown Hotkeys has improved support for mathjax, delete, and casing.
• KOReader Highlights 0.6.0 now automatically detect any changes just to the text of the note itself (ignoring every other element of the note)) and update the frontmatter properties without any intervention from the user.
• Metadata Extractor now exports the frontmatter as well. Duplicate file names in links and backlinks should be resolved properly as of 1.0.0.

Betas

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

• You can now pop your notes out into a second window. It's incredibly useful but also, be warned (and please don't spam the dev with feature requests, he knows!), very limited — the data is read-only. Embeds and links don't work. Plugins that generate static rendered HTML will work (i.e. Admonitions) but essentially none of the others (i.e. Dataview).
• Here's a fork of Obsidian Tasks that adds some features like agenda view, date autocomplete, and mobile widgets. Here's the developer announcing it on Reddit.
• Bartender 0.5.0 can now fuzzy filter the file explorer contents. Also, the drag to rearrange behavior is now toggled via a nav button and should make it easier to move things around/keep them locked in place

For Developers

• Github is allowing users to set up sponsors-only repositories, for folks who are looking for an easier way to manage things like "insider betas" for plugins and themes, or members-only plugins. That's the sum total of what I know about it, but I'm curious if anyone finds a way to use this.

Feature Requests

• Here's a feature request for intelligently suggesting ways to filter search results
• Here's a feature request for card view of Obsidian files, modeled on how tools like Heptabase and Scrintal work.
• Here's a request to make updating themes easier.

Appearance

• Here's a discord post on how to get dataview tables to wordwrap that personally saved me oodles of stress.
• Minimal 5.1.0 adds translucent sidebars, colorful headings, and dozens of customization options. 5.1.1 has some new settings and improvements. 5.1.2 adds the macOS color scheme.
• Here's a css snippet to omit the search terms from query blocks, which makes them look a little cleaner.
• Sanctum v0.6.3 added some new Style settings, support for Kepano's image grid and minimal cards snippets, and a bunch of other small changes.
• Catppuccin by @mbeckrich is a soothing pastel theme.
• Sparkling Wisdom by @learnerfvs is very bright.
• The Shimmering Focus variant Willemstad v0.15 Amstel has 2 new color palettes and a bunch of options.
• Here's a way to dock Obsidian settings on the sidebar à la devtools. It does mess with the general modal container, so things like the command palette get adjusted in weird ways. If you use it, make it a snippet you can toggle on and off.
• Here's a special snippet called Absolve designed to function as a "theme overlap" with custom design schemes (i.e. for ttrpgs and academic uses), colors, kanban styles, popular features from different themes, etc.
• Bubble Space Theme v1.5 comes with preset colors, custom checkboxes, new theme icons, and more.
• Prism v1.5.0 added animations, contrast improvements, and a bunch of visual improvements and other fixes.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a custom compile step that will turn +++ into the syntax required for a page break in Word when converting with Pandoc, on Discord.
• Here's a python script to download and update css snippet from github (Discord link).

Guides

• Here's how to make flashcards and vocabulary notes for language learning.
• Here's an article about the fundamental design principles that underlie Obsidian's development.
• Here's a guide for creating a simple habit tracker in Obsidian using Dataview
• Here's a guide for how to use clip web content to Obsidian
• Here are six different ways to use note links.
• Here's an article I like that talks more about the notetaking as gardening metaphor that came up in Discord.
• Here's a discord post about how Dataview can help track upcoming courses.

Discussions

• Here are Dan Allosso's reflections from Week 1 of the Smart Notes book club. Here's the public vault for the previous book club for David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything.
• Here's a Reddit thread where someone shared how they used Obsidian to create a field guide for trauma survivors. It's published as an obsidian publish site and is a really interesting resource.
• Here's an interesting discussion about switching from Emacs Org-Mode to Obsidian.
• Here's one about switching from Notion to Obsidian.
• Here's a discussion about how to use Obsidian as an engineering student.
• Here's a discord discussion about categories and types of notes.
• Here's a discord discussion about how following some notetaking methods can force you to think in different ways.
• Here's a Discord discussion about how Obsidian tangibly increased someone's academic performance.

Ancillary Tools

• According to this discussion you can iframe Notion tables into Obsidian. You can also link to block ref with Notion using methods described in that Discord discussion.

Housekeeping

My first exclusive article will go out to financial supporters on Thursday (the third Thursday of the month, which is what I'm shooting for now). It will be about the value of consistent naming conventions. Afterwards, I'll probably raise the price a bit soon (I've been poking around and Substack says $5 is normal), so if you'd like to lock in the current $3/mo or $30/year...

Also, several people signed up for one-on-one meetings with me this week. I was able to give individualized help and advice, and I really enjoyed it. More importantly, I felt like I genuinely was able to help those people and save them time, as well as offer hope and energy.

Lastly, a request: Does anybody use obsidian for something like private practice psychology, social work, etc., where you have to balance session notes, keeping up with the literature, client paperwork, etc., who would be willing to write a guide or advise me on writing a guide for this? There's interest in this from folks in these fields, and one way or another I'm going to make it a point to help them. I initiated some discussion about HIPAA considerations on Twitter, but I would love to speak with or signal boost an expert on this.

Insider Mobile v1.1.0 (Build 37) is up to parity with Desktop and also:

• iOS: Fixed drag and drop and long-hold context menu not working.
• Android: Improve cold startup performance for large vaults.
• Android: Fix sync sometimes react to files when nothing has changed due to mis-reported modified times.
• Android: Fixed images from http sources not loaded due to insecure context.

It should now be much easier to open Obsidian quickly — and if your load times are still long, you can get a report on which plugins are slowing down your load times, if you have plugins enabled. For me personally, Obsidian now opens roughly as fast as Google Keep 🥳

Plugin News

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.

• Divide & Conquer by @chrisgrieser  provides commands for bulk enabling/disabling of plugins. It's useful for debugging when you have many plugins.
• Excel to Markdown Table by @ganesshkumar  lets users paste Excel tables as Markdown tables in Obsidian editor; this is a nice complement to Advanced Tables so people don't have to iframe converter websites anymore.
• Relative Line Numbers in Live Preview by @EndlessReform  looks like a fork of relative line numbers updated for the new editor.
• Power Search by @aviral-batra   searches Anki Notes based on the current line.
• Live2D Widget by @moelody  will add live2d model widget to obsidian; it's an anime-esque visual frill.

Updates

• QuickAdd 0.5.0 has mobile support 🥳 just in time to run the zettelizer macrp on my new iPad.
• Quick Explorer 0.1.10 got some bugfixes and should work better in Live Preview now.
• Emoji Toolbar v0.3.1 has improved compatibility with Primary theme, & Live Preview users can now press 'Enter' to insert the first emoji in the list.

• KOReader Sync 0.3.0 has a setting to create a note with a dataviewjs query so that all the notes of a book can be shown in a single big list. 0.4.0 added commands to sync, mark note as edited (or not), or to enable/disable sync.

• Map View now supports a proper "new geolocation note" dialog with geosearch and configurable URL parsing (from Google Maps etc).
• Task Collector 0.7.6 has support for Snippetor, which is actively iterating to work with more themes and load faster — the idea is that it will support custom styling for - [?] style checkboxes across themes.
• Code Editor Shortcut 1.5.0 lets users copy selected lines up/down in a way that emulates VS Code.
• you can now turn off drop shadows in Admonition settings. Nested admonitions will receive a light border to make them visually distinct.

Betas

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

• Bartender adds support for rearranging the view action icons and Minimal's  floating ribbon bar. The order will be saved whenever you rearrange the icons. Bartender also now supports custom sorting of files and folders. Here's a demonstration on Discord.
• You can make a word or tag cloud for your vault; it's a nice visual representation of what you write about most often. It turns out I have a lot of notes about domestication.
• Remotely-save 0.2.14 has improvements for OneDrive syncing
• The new Goodreads plugin Booksidian lets users choose from the list of all parameters available over the Goodreads RSS feed  (+ some extra that can be deduced from them like subtitle or series). It has templating features to let users lay out the body and  frontmatter according to their preferences.

For Developers

• Here's some tips about how to write good documentation.

Appearance

• Here's how to use Minimal & Dataview to create a gorgeous card view of your library.
• Shimmering Focus has a new writing cssClass: Applying it to a note will switch the theme to a serif font, justified text, slightly tinted background, and more (configurable with the Style Settings Plugin). There's also a new alternate Shimmering Focus, created by @Melvin, which includes a style setting for colored heading backgrounds (one of my personal favorite theme features).
• Sanctum v.0.6.2 added new color schemes; cold grey, hearth, moss (my favorite!), and tide. There were also a bunch of tweaks and bugfixes.
• Minimal 5.0 also added new color schemes for Dracula, Gruvbox, Nord, Notion, Things & Solarized.
• Ebullientworks 1.3.12 got a bunch of fixes and improvements, including blockquotes in live preview and support for Snippetor.
• Primary got some bugfixes.
• Here's a snippet to style kanban dates & completed cards from @mgmeyers in Discord.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a templater script to copy the current Obsidian note as a markdown link ([Title](ObsidianURI)) to easily open your Obsidian notes from anywhere.

Guides

• Here's how to use Voiceliner as a quick capture tool for Obsidian. It's got good support for creating outlines with voice-to-text, it seems like.
• Here's a guide from an ex-Evernote user about how to find notes quickly in Obsidian.
• Here's how to get nested daily note folders natively in Obsidian.
• This Dataview tutorial got resurfaced as a particularly accessible guide.

Discussions

• Here's a nice discussion about using Obsidian for task management. Their system is a lot more complicated than mine, which I discussed over on Twitter. The beautiful thing about Obsidian is how flexible it is 💚
• Here's a nice discussion about methods for managing information about a library of books.
• This unpopular opinion: Obsidian is an excellent Task Manager thread on Reddit got a lot of love.
• I wrote a piece about why I think it's okay if Obsidian isn't your 'second brain,' it's 'just' an awesome notetaking app. It got discussed on Twitter and Reddit.
• Here's a discussion on Discord about the value of the Graph Analysis plugin, which was later summarized on the forum.

Ancillary Tools

• Someone asked for my Readwise export template, so I made a gist for it.
• Here's a Windows utility which allows you to search & launch vault files without having Obsidian open.

Housekeeping

My supporters-only 5x8 event had some great discussion, and I wanted to share a really awesome "digital brain" project that dates from 1997 "Jerry's brain" got brought up during the discussion of "second brains" and it was fascinating to see how old the metaphor — and process — is.

We also discussed this great article about the difference between planning to start and planning to finish.

I also officially finalized moving my articles off Wordpress & onto Ghost thanks to the incredible concierge service. My new landing page is a static site (hand-edited, no generator, & I used SCSS) hosted on GitHub & Netlify. All the old links should still work; if you happen to find a broken one, let me know.

I still have some auditing to do, and I haven't decided if/how to transfer comments over to the Roundup, but in the meantime, the Roundup is now the official home of my Obsidian-adjacent essays & thoughts, while the Iceberg hosts all of my worldbuilding/history/book review stuff.

If you haven't already read my piece on why it's hard to teach critical thinking skills, maybe check it out at its new home?

• The results of Gems of the Year 2021 have been posted. I am deeply honored to have been voted Content Creator of the year and to have had the top achievement. Thank you to everyone who voted 💚 but also, go check out the other awesome stuff this community has done! Several winners donated parts of their prizes to active & helpful members of the community, which has been heartwarming.
• There have been lots of questions about whether particular plugins work on mobile or Live Preview. There's now a community Google Sheet to track plugins and themes that can be updated by community members and developers for basic data. If you've been looking for a way to help out but don't have time to maintain a plugin or theme, this is a great way.
• The Discord server now has 50,000 members. 🤯

Obsidian Updates

• 0.13.23, which includes  v0.13.20, v0.13.201, v0.13.22, & v0.13.23, is now available for public access. This release is mostly focused on improvements and bugfixes for Live Preview, but my favorite little thing is that they added an option in community plugin pane to help debug slow plugin startup times. This should make it easier for people whose vaults feel like they're opening slowly to figure out which plugin is the culprit.

Plugin News

New in Community Plugins

These plugins went through code review and are now available in Obsidian's plugin list. Licat had a busy week! You may have read about some of these as betas last week, but they're now available in community plugins, so I'm mentioning it again.

• Obsidian shortcut launcher runs iOS shortcuts as Obsidian commands. Federico Viticci wrote about how much the shortcut launcher changed how he uses Obsidian.
• Sortable by @alexandru-dinu  offers wiki-like table sorting. Note that this is similar to functionality offered by the  Advanced Tables Plugin. Sortable works more like Wikipedia (and works with dataview tables), whereas Advanced Tables works more like excel. Sortable won't change the actual markdown, Advanced Tables will.
• Snippetor by @ebullient  lets users create and tweak common snippets (starting with custom tasks). The goal with this plugin is to make styling - [?] sorts of data-task icons consistent across themes according to user preference.
• Dynamic Highlights by @nothingislost  lets users dynamically highlight text based on cursor selection or search query with full regex, mobile, and live preview support.  There's also a built-in CSS editor that allows for attaching CSS styles directly to highlighters.
• ObsidianTweaks by @JeppeKlitgaard  adds some convenient tweaks including improved toggling and ergonomic commands.
• PARA Shortcuts by @gOATiful  makes it easy to archive and un-archive files.
• Local File Interface by @qawatake  provides commands for moving files in and out of the vault, sort of like how you can use a "browse" menu on a web-based file picker to "import" files into, for example, a photo album. It's nice if you want to avoid leaving the Obsidian workspace to go find a file.
• Obsidian Memos by @Quorafind  is a plugin for quickly capturing ideas in Obsidian. 1.7.0 added support for sharing. 1.7.9 allows users to copy and paste the results of queries and searches.
• Completr by @tth05  plugin provides advanced auto-completion functionality, similar to how Various Complements works. The main difference is in how they handle LaTeX.

Sync External Tools

• Siteswap by @tdresser  is useful for jugglers.
• Weather Fetcher by @fyears  will fetch and insert current weather into the editor of Obsidian.
• Wordle by @dbarenholz  creates a view where you can play Wordle.
• Pinboard Sync by @Automatt  syncs Pinboard.in links with Daily Notes
• KOReader Highlights by @Edo78  syncs highlights and notes taken in KOReader.

Advanced

• Link Server by @moelody  will open a reverse proxy server at port 3333 to get wikiLink information Obsidian API.
• Binary File Manager by @qawatake   will detect new binary files in the vault and create markdown files with metadata.

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. Remember, though, this is not as safe as waiting for them to go through code review.

• Frontmatter Tag Suggest by @jmilldotdev   autocompletes tags in the YAML tags field, which is an excellent quality of life improvement — I've heard a ton of people complain about this and have always been a little surprised it wasn't a core feature.
• Better Command Palette by @AlexBieg  helps slash commands prioritize recent commands, lets users backspace to close, supports opening a new file, and file creation.
• Simple note quiz by @dorisxx  lets users create quizzes in their notes, similar to Anki cards, except it'll also grade your answers.
• Multi-Column Markdown by @ckRobinson  adds functionality to create markdown documents with multiple columns of content viewable within Obsidian's preview mode
• Copy as HTML by @jenningsb2  converts  selected markdown to HTML and copies it to the clipboard.
• Code Block Labels by @stbowers  adds labels to fenced code blocks so that you can, for example, "title" a code block. It does not currently plan to support Live Preview.

Advanced

• Save as Gist by @ghedamat   lets you save your current note as a Gist on GitHub.
• Local REST API by @coddingtonbear  lets users get, change or otherwise interact with Obsidian notes via a REST API.

Betas

• You can now drag and recorder icons on the ribbon bar and status bar (desktop & mobile) with the new Bartender  plugin. It also has hide/collapse functionality.
• Codeblock Completer adds an editor suggestor modal for you to quickly complete codeblock names, i.e. autocomplete admonitions.
• Persistent Graph lets users save and restore the locations of nodes on your graph. This has been a long-requested feature, but note that the developer is not planning to submit it to the community list because it relies on some potentially unstable APIs.

Updates

• Templater 1.10.0 now supports user functions (i.e. can now run JS templater scripts) on mobile.
• Tag Wrangler 0.5.0 now has support for tag pages.
• Breadcrumbs now supports juggl codeblocks and juggl view. This is enough of a game-changer that I'm planning to devote a chunk of February to integrating this with my slipbox along with the Linked Data Vocabularies plugin and this script to automatically generate a file for each header of a controlled vocabulary (there's also one for creating folders).
• Longform 1.1.0  revamped the Compile feature that lets you build custom workflows to turn your projects into compiled manuscripts. There's new support for user scripts. Find out more from the compile documentation.
• Emoji Toolbar v0.3.0 supports skin tones, has fuzzy search functionality, and lets users select recently used emojis.
• Remotely-save got some bugfixes and now lets users trigger sync using a command.
• Various Complements 5.5.0 has new documentation, support for multi-word completions, improved suggestions, and better handling of yaml and code blocks.
• Obsidian Map View has a bunch of new features, including dark mode and the ability to switch map sources.
• TTRPG Statblocks v2.0 involved a rewrite of the entire rendering engine, which makes it faster and more consistent. Users can also create their own statblock layouts, integrate with dice roller, create a bestiary from frontmatter, and a ton of other awesome updates for tabletop gamers. This involves a breaking change for Initiative Tracker, which no longer handles homebrew creatures because that got moved to Statblocks.
• Supercharged Links got a big performance update and now lets you supercharge your quick switcher, links suggestor, and backlinks in document.

For Developers

from v0.13.22:

• Added: an option in community plugin pane to help debug slow plugin startup times.
• Fixed: editorLivePreviewField not dynamically updated when Live preview is turned on/off.
• Added data-type to tab header elements.

Feature Requests

• Here's a nice article about migrating from Roam and what aspects of web-based outliners feel "missing" from the Obsidian experience.

Appearance

• Here's an example of a pdf stylesheet to make exporting to PDF a bit nicer.
• Primary now has Live Preview support and a bunch of fixes. The developer's birthday is tomorrow, by the way — here's her ko-fi page.
• Shimmering Focus (the most aggressively "minimalistic" theme I'm aware of) now has a full-blown documentation site to showcase & explain all its features — including sidebar navigation & full-text search.
• ITS Theme got some restylings and the ability to toggle off alternate checkboxes to support the Snippetor plugin.
• Minimal 4.4.4 & 4.4.5 added more support for cards, style settings, and progress bar styling.
• Cyber Glow v6.4 added support for Live Preview and some other small improvements.
• Sanctum v0.6.1 got a big update. It now handles strike-throughs differently, has support for new table styles and the Indentation Guides plugin, and are also now toggleable to support the Snippetor plugin.
• Prism v1.3.1 has better calendar support. 1.4.0 now supports Icon Folder and Map view.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a script to create a folder structure according to Library of Congress Classification.
• Here's a neat little timeline for your daily note that shows how far into the  year we are.
• There now exists a script (in Discord) to support a process by which dataview renders a table, buttons puts a button in the table, you can click the button, Templater will prompt you for a date, and Natural Language Dates gives Meta Edit a properly formatted number to update the YAML of the specified note with. This lets you easily update notes from a dataview table.

Courses & Consulting

• Bianca Pereira, along with "Linking Your Thinking", is offering 3 scholarships for Masters and PhD students for their upcoming workshop. The deadline to apply is end of day Sunday anywhere on Earth. Her new newsletter is designed to help academics navigate academia.
• Curtis McHale announced a new 4-week cohort course. It's designed to help people focus on making connections.
• I set up a page to facilitate one-on-one consultations. If you want me to hop on Zoom and help you with something related to Obsidian, notetaking, writing, or knowledge management, you can now book directly to my calendar. Spots are limited right now, but I'll adjust depending on how things go.

Guides

• Here's a guide for Creating your own Obsidian iOS Widget.
• Here's a discussion about how to get averages and sums from Dataview.
• Here's documentation for the process of figuring out what kinds of notes and tags worked for one individual.
• Here's a guide on how to make use of the graph view.

Discussions

• Here's an interesting discussion about having one big "daily notes" file, instead of individual daily notes. It also discusses some standardizations that help with search.
• Here's a lengthy (and really insightful, brass-tacks) discussion from HackerNews about why programmers & developer-adjacent communities seem really into notetaking lately.

In The Wild

• Obsidian won the Golden Kitty Award for best mobile app over at ProductHunt, yay!
• Here's a nice metaphor about how Obsidian works, as part of a longer piece on using python to manipulate your notes:  many programs build a fence and give you a few gates through it. Obsidian avoids building the fence

Ancillary Tools

• Here's some information about why iCloud sometimes causes problems; the issue is not limited to Obsidian.
• One of my biggest pain points about having multiple vaults open is that, unlike when I have two Chrome profiles open, my vaults get grouped on my taskbar as one item. It turns out that Windows has an option to disable this in Windows 10. Here's a utility to get the old-school taskbar where you can actually see each "window" — which makes it much easier to work with nested vaults 🥳 Don't laugh, but this was the biggest find for me this week personally.
• A couple of people have asked how to get spreadsheets and HTML tables into Obsidian and there are a couple of answers depending on what you're doing, so I thought I'd share the discussion.
• Here's an in-browser text editor to easily create static html pages from markdown, which looks handy for one-off sharing of files if you don't want to be fussed with pandoc.
• Heyday is a subscription-based memory aid app that is designed to give you a daily summary of what you looked up and resurface useful content in the context you might need it again. I haven't tried it, but it apparently indexes documents, emails, and messages and sort of serves as a search companion to remind you of stuff you already found.
• Here's a list from Discord of useful tools and generators.

Housekeeping

Since last week, when I announced that I'm exploring the idea of not going back to work teaching in the fall, things have been pretty exciting.

My article about why folders shouldn't be villainized got featured in The Browser (which has like 75k subscribers), and then hit the front page of HackerNews. As exciting as this is (front page of HackerNews is literally a dream come true — people in my "personal life" got to see one of my articles "in the wild"), the traffic spike also crashed my website and I had to figure out Cloudflare caching on the fly.

Also, almost 10% of Roundup subscribers have upgraded to a paid plan, which is about what Substack says is what a "high quality" newsletter can expect (although apparently I'm underpriced, oops). I am very encouraged by this! In addition to opening up my calendar for helping people in 30min one-on-one sessions, Tuesday morning (EST) I'm planning to combine the best parts of a book club, a 5x15 event (5 speakers, 15 minutes each) and a powerpoint party. The event will be hosted on Zoom.

I have a steep road ahead of me before I can meaningfully replace my teaching income by working from home, but the guideposts are well-marked and my fellow travelers have been very kind. Thank you 💚

So instead you get a mass email, sorry for the lack of personalization 💚💚

First, some numbers & logistics. About 10% of Roundup subscribers have upgraded to a paid plan, which is about what Substack says is what a "high quality" newsletter can expect. I am very encouraged by this!

To celebrate, I want to do a virtual event — something you might find valuable, but that's also fun and kind of casual. I'm still working out the logistics of whether I'll host it on Zoom or Topia (there are pros and cons to each), but it'll be at 9AM EST on Tuesday, February 1 — exactly one week from the time this email is scheduled to go out.

I'm planning to combine the best parts of a book club, a 5x15 event (5 speakers, 15 minutes each) with a powerpoint party. It'll be called Eleanor's 5x8 — numbers chosen because that's the size of an index card, which feels appropriate. The idea is that everyone will show up with an article they liked and want to share (preferably one you've got notes on), which feels more bite-sized than a traditional book club and we won't all have read the same thing — which can sometimes be a more effective method of collaborative learning.

I'll go first, "whole group" style, and talk for no longer than 8 minutes. Then we'll split off into groups of five (I'll probably bounce around to see how things are going, just like I would in a classroom), share articles in small groups, and then after 40 minutes (or when groups are done) come back to the "main" room to share highlights with the big group.

• The next 4-week Book Club hosted by Dan Allosso will take place in February. It'll be focused on note-taking workflow and will cover How to Take Smart Notes and a couple of Zettelkasten articles.

Obsidian Updates

desktop Insiders v0.13.20 & .21 fixed a bunch of bugs and got the following improvements:

• The new editor now supports the cssclass frontmatter property.
• Live Preview will now detect whether the editor is focused to apply syntax hiding.
• Community plugin search filter will now also match by author.
• Added shortcuts for plugin settings and hotkeys in the community plugins list

mobile Insider v1.1.0 (Build 35) was mostly a feature update to get mobile up to parity with desktop v0.13.21. Specifically, the mobile Insider now supports:

• Drag and drop by long-holding (files and folders, starred, outline pane)
• Long holding to view the image full-screen.

Plugin News

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.

• Core Search Assistant by @qawatake   enhances the built-in search by offering a keyboard interface, card preview, & bigger preview.
• Dynamic Highlights by @nothingislost   highlights text based on cursor selection or search query with full regex, mobile, and live preview support.
• Weather Fetcher by @fyears   will fetch and insert current weather into the editor.

Updates

• Auto Link Title got fixed! 1.2.5 integrates a bunch of community fixes so now it doesn't overwrite data anymore. I am very excited for this one, it's like having an old friend back :)
• QuickAdd now supports multi-line inputs.
• Ledger  now supports editing existing transactions. You can also now add comments to a transaction and have multiple splits.
• Advanced Tables will no longer try to format tables that are in code blocks or math blocks. It also now ignores tables that are preceded by -tx- so it plays nice with Table Extended
• File Tree Alternative now includes an additional button to Reveal Active File within the plugin's file tree. There's also a new custom event handler, which you can trigger programmatically in case you would like to customize.
• Supercharged Links version 0.4.2 now properly targets styled dataview inline fields. 0.4.4 supports the recent files plugin, properly unloads styling in panes, and instantly applies styling to the file browser.
• Table Extended v1.6.0 introduced experimental export to pdf support for -tx- tables.
• Excalidraw added a new font and fixed hover previews link.
• Remotely-Save adds support for scheduled auto-sync and new sidebar ribbon icons.
• Memos 1.2.0 lets users use @ to get a date picker and now has a translation module. 1.3.0 supports file suggest, task switching, date formats, and more. 1.4.3 added a button and bottom mode for mobile. It's up to 1.6.1 now and got a number of features.
• As of 0.4.7, Tag Wrangler will no longer reformat metadata fields or comments that don't contain changed tags.
• Obsidian Linter 1.2.9 has improved performance on large notes, and a new rule: remove-empty-list-markers
• The Imgur plugin has been fixed to support the new editor.
• The Raycast extension has new shortcuts for searching and a new command for creating notes, with a tag picker and folder structure support.
• Chessboard 0.5.0 allows users to rotate the chessboard.
• Linked Data Vocabularies now supports the opening of selected headings in the browser.
• AnkiBridge 0.6.0 works with Live Preview now, and got a bunch of new documentation, but includes a breaking change that will require a migration (which is well-documented).

Betas

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

• Breadcrumbs 2.40.1 has support for implied relationships. You can learn more about how it works in the #breadcrumbs thread on Discord.

For Developers

• There's a new discord channel for theme/CSS development, called #appearance-dev
• If you haven't seen the developer resources on the Hub you should definitely check them out. There's even a neat list of what tools and libraries are used by Obsidian.

Also, from the v0.13.20 Insider:

• Fixed sometimes empty duplicate <span> elements show up before or after widgets, causing issues when using css padding or :before/:after.
• The debug info command now includes the OS information.
• There is now a new editorLivePreviewField: StateField<boolean> that can be used to check whether Live Preview is enabled in the editor.
• Fixed out-of-bound {line,ch} pairs causes error with new editor
• Introduced apiVersion: string and requireApiVersion(version: string): boolean to help with API version requirements. Plugin authors can use this function to limit functionality that depends on new Obsidian APIs to avoid crashing on older versions of Obsidian.

Feature Requests

• Some folks would like the file deletion dialog to be a bit nicer.
• Wouldn't a quick switcher for themes be nice?

Appearance

• LYT Mode is officially available now.
• Ebullientworks 0.3.0 spun out bullet journal style alternative checkbox styles into a snippet that works with the default theme. Sanctum style custom checkboxes are also available as a snippet.
• Minimal 4.4.2 has support for cards and table helpers in Live Preview. 4.4.3 improved stylings and got a bunch of fixes.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a script from Nicole van der Hoeven to prioritize reading material.
• Here's a tutorial for how to use templater's javascript scripts
• The Alfred Workflow for Obsidian now has a scratchpad, support for the BRAT plugin, features for developers, easier installation, and a bunch of other things. Here's a reddit discussion of people talking about how helpful it is.
• Here's a script to fetch video game data using QuickAdd.

Discussions

• Approximately eleven billion people bookmarked this Discord discussion of how to decide between focusing on using Obsidian for references or reflection and methods for annotating and creating literature notes.
• Here's an extensive discussion about whether Obsidian Sync is worth it from Reddit (a community that tends to be very anti-spending-money, for what it's worth).

Showcases & Guides

• I wrote a bit about my recent refactor of how I organize my articles and tags.
• Here's how Mark McElroy uses Readwise & Obsidian to prompt a morning journaling process
• Here's Curtis McHale on 9 plugins writers should check out.
• Here's Misha on how to use Obsidian daily notes to support a creative workflow.
• Here's Nadja showcasing her personal knowledge management system and daily driver maps of content via Linking Your Thinking.
• Here's a really great twitter thread about how managers to can use Obsidian to have more confidence in their decision-making.
• Here's a nice video about how to use Obsidian for academic work, including a section on how Evan uses the graph view.
• This showcase of different graph clusters in someone's 2 year old vault did really well in Hacker News.
• Personal Knowledge Management: How to Choose the Right System for You by Denise Todd is from the perspective of a former Roam user who now uses Obsidian.
• There's a new Zotero / bibnotes workflow explanation available that I think is intended for the Zotero beta.
• How to export web articles' highlighted sentences into Obsidian
• Here's how you can use latex efficiently for even live lecture notes
• Here's a weekly blog series on Jamie Rubin's migration to Obsidian from Evernote He's known for being Evernote's "paperless ambassador" about ten years back. He also had some great tips over in the Reddit discussion.

Small Tips

• If you mark a codeblock as ```poetry (or prose) it'll use black instead of red text.

Ancillary Tools

• The PDF to markdown conversion over at Scholarcy supports tables, including tables that are split across pages. It's still in alpha, but if you're one of the many obsidian users who enjoys spaced repetition and flashcards to help parse academic research, they have an AI for that.
• The static site generator eleventy (useful to host notes as an alternative to publish, Hugo, or Jekyll), just had their 1.0 release.  Zola got mentioned as an alternative.

Housekeeping

I'm working on moving my articles about Obsidian over from my personal blog to the Obsidian roundup. If you follow the Roundup vs RSS, your feeds might "push" these to you in bulk, depending on whether the reader respects publication-dates. If you get an email from me that is a longform article, it will be because I messed up the button in the Ghost interface. Sorry!

This is happening because I'm shuttering my blog at eleanorkonik.com over the next few weeks. For a variety of reasons, it's time for eleanorkonik.com to be more of a landing page and less of a blog. Old links should redirect to new homes for all the articles by the time I'm done. Essays related to Obsidian & knowledge management will be hosted here, stuff about worldbuilding & history is getting moved to The Iceberg newsletter.

As part of this, I will start sending out at least one essay edition a month to the wonderful people who have supported the Roundup financially. It will probably ship on the third Thursday of the month, because I do really well with recurring deadlines like that. If you prefer not to get those in your inbox, I plan to pre-pend all the titles with an 🌲emoji, to help with filtering.

If you do want a monthly essay from me about stuff like productivity, notetaking, my perspectives on tools other than Obsidian that are nonetheless relevant to our community, folders vs. namespacing, how to actually use some of the new plugins I tell you about, when to use tags vs. metadata, etc...

You may have heard me talk before about how much I love teaching, and how I wasn't planning to quit teaching to write. It was true at the time — because I do love teaching. But the fact of the matter is, I haven't heard a single reassuring thing from colleagues about the pandemic's impacts on my school district. Besides, as one of my fellow moderators pointed out: I love teaching — not just teaching children.

As I approach a million words of notes in my vault, I realize that I have a ton of things I want to say. Things I've been scared to commit to, because I knew I'd have to scale back when the new school year comes. I have thoughts about the discourse surrounding personal knowledge management that I've been holding off on sharing because I thought it would be better not to start something I wouldn't be able to continue.

Tens of thousands of words worth of thoughts are about productivity and notetaking and leveraging Obsidian. A lot of it never quite felt "right" as something as static as a book in the quick-changing world of Obsidian plugins (although I do plan to ship my nonfiction book once my kid starts daycare full time 👀).

After weeks of self-reflection, it turns out that want — very badly — to be able to produce more of the kind of work that led you all to vote me Content Creator of the Year for the Obsidian community (!)

With your help, I can.

PS: Subscription prices gets locked at the moment you sign up. It's possible that I'll increase the price of new subscriptions if I start doing things like office hours, or weekly essays instead of monthly.

& don't worry — even if I do have to go back into the school building, this newsletter will continue to exist. The Roundup itself will always be free.

• Obsidian is up for the Golden Kitty Award at ProductHunt for Obsidian Mobile. Go vote — and check out the other top contenders, because there's some interesting software being developed and shared over there.
• Alexander Rink has been doing performance benchmarks of different "tools for thought." The results for Obsidian "blew away the competition up to a factor of more than 100." Make sure to read the comments! There's an excellent discussion (featuring plugin dev extraordinaire @pjeby) about how to get Obsidian to be able to do all the "outliner" and "block" functionality. Pjeby is very knowledgeable about stuff that not everyone realizes is possible in Obsidian. This comment thread also gives a neat look "under the hood" of how hard Licat has worked to make Obsidian so performant.  Some of the key points have been migrated to the Obsidian forum for posterity.
• The AppStories podcast has been doing an in-depth series on Obsidian, and I particularly enjoyed the discussion in Part 3 about cleaning up no-longer-used plugins and taking a moment to think about how you're using your tools (and what potential conflicts might have snuck into your workflow). Incidentally, here's a discussion about which Tools for Thought & productivity podcasts are worth a listen.
• The plugins by category list in the Obsidian Hub has far surpassed what I can personally maintain for the Roundup's plugins page, so I took that down. I highly recommend perusing the Hub's plugin list.
• The Obsidian Community talks are leveraging the new Discord events features. You can find out more about the upcoming talks about plugins that won Obsidian October (today) and themes that won Obsidian October (tomorrow) on Discord.
• There's a new Discord thread for sharing ideas of what Obsidian merchandise you'd consider buying. Leah made some beautiful T-shirt/mug mockups if you'd like to get a sneak peek.

Obsidian Updates

• Live Preview has come to the Insider build for Mobile. The only announcement I was able to find was in  Discord.

Plugin News

New in Community Plugins

These plugins went through code review and are now available in Obsidian's plugin list.

• Import Foundry VTT journal entries by @farling42 Imports your journal entries from Foundry virtual tabletop worlds into Obsidian, which should be useful for the tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) users (of which we've been getting a lot more of!)
• TimeStamper by @Gru80 lets users insert customized time/date stamps into their notes, which should be useful for people who like to take a lot of timestamped meeting and lecture notes. Note that the Natural Language Dates allows for similar functionality. You can format your date as a timestamp, or set up a hotkey for inserting date or time.

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.

• Enhanced Live Preview Features by @mirnovov brings some link behaviors from reading view into live preview mode, i.e. you can click a link to open it without holding down ctrl/cmd. There are some other features, but that's the main one.
• Sortable by @alexandru-dinu lets you sort tables by different columns, like Wikipedia. If you use dataview tables or any tables at all, I highly recommend this.
• Pinboard Sync by @Automatt syncs Pinboard.in links with Daily Notes
• Wordle by @dbarenholz will let you play Wordle from inside an Obsidian view. You can also share your results in the new Discord thread in the #off-topic channel.
• 13th Age Statblocks by @ben is another TTPRG plugin. It lets users render 13th Age statblocks in Obsidian.
• The Notes Publish Plugin uses Airtable and something like Netlify to  publish your notes. It's one of many "alternate publish methods," including this guide for how to use Netlify and Zola to make a static site from your Obsidian notes.
• Obsidian Tweaks changes some hotkey behaviors, most notably adding more intuitive toggling behavior for things like italics, copying lines, and toggling headers. Some features are similar to the Smarter Markdown Hotkeys plugin. It supports Live Preview & Mobile.
• PARA Shortcuts by @gOATiful has some helpful commands to setup and manage your knowledge using the PARA method.
• Siteswap by @tdresser is designed to help jugglers visualize juggling patterns.
• Phrasebank by @viktorbezdek adds shortcodes with various pre-written phrases to improve quality and productivity of your writing, similar to an espanso package.

Updates

• Dataview 0.4.22 got a huge performance update. Make sure you update and then restart Obsidian (you should honestly always restart obsidian after updating your plugins).
• Templater 1.9.11 now has autocompletion of modules and function names when you type tp. — the templater docs also got a big update.
• Various Complements v.4.1.0  added a "suggest with alias" option. This plugin, by the way, is basically an autocomplete tool that pops up automatically. Currently, it works for single words and filenames, but there's an open issue for support for longer phrases. I saw settings for Japanese and Arabic in addition to the default.
• The indentation guides plugin now supports adding guides to lists in reading modes.
• Admonitions v6.8.0 adds a new type of non-code block admonitions based on the Microsoft Document Syntax for blockquotes.
• Obsidian Git v1.20.0 lets users open files (and file history) on github, get a diff view, add a folder tree view to the sidebar, and allow multiline commit messages in the sidebar.
• The Pomodoro plugin got some updates and bugfixes, including support for a log file.
• Key Promoter (which helps you learn hotkeys) now has statistics on your most used buttons and hotkeys, and descriptions of actions (which is useful for presentations!)
• The co-citations for graph analysis got updated so that it renders previews into markdown, and has outline support which allows outliner-style queries. The release notes in Discord are really useful.
• Typewriter Scroll now supports Live Preview.

Betas

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

• Here's a floating outline plugin that was prototyped. It's still in progress, but looks promising!
• There's an awesome new citations plugin in process that was discussed extensively on Discord. It lets users import all literature notes in one go, works off of inline and footnote references, has new citation fields, and allows for bibliography style referencing. Academics are highly encouraged to check this out.
• Task Collector 0.6.3 is now available via BRAT. It can now run commands that mark all tasks (complete, cancel, or reset) in all modes, handle moment formats, and has a toggle to remove checkboxes when moving tasks. 0.6.4 has a modal popup and a few breaking changes.
• The memos plugin has a tag suggester and a new settings button. It also has a dark theme and custom colors.
• Multi Select will enable you to write a dataviewJS query to narrow the list of links (based on your own criteria), then select the ones that you want to include in your current note with some formatting capabilities.
• TTRPG Statblocks v2.4.0 has a new text layout block type, the ability to render markdown inside of the blocks, and improved CSS handlers.
• Here's some exciting Breadcrumbs x Juggl interoperability that's currently in beta. Here's the announcement on Discord. Breadcrumbs has a thread in the #plugins-advanced channel of Discord, by the way, if you'd like to learn more about it.

For Developers

• Link to Obsidian creates an API to Obsidian files, similar to the metadata extractor.
• Paras Chopra is looking to pay $100 to whoever implements a dynamically updating RSS feed for Obsidian Publish, which has been an open feature request for quite some time. I would also find this very valuable from the perspective of following updates from the Obsidian hub. Note: the discussion on the twitter thread from Paras has some useful workarounds and ideas, I recommend checking it out.
• The developer of the Vale plugin, which is essentially a "linter for prose" (it helps enforce style guides), is looking for help migrating from CM5 to CM6. He's collated some resources but it looks like a codemirror extension might be necessary? If you have any guidance or know any tricks (or have some time and are looking for a project you wouldn't necessarily have to maintain), please check out the issue linked above. Vale is really useful for writers.
• Here's an outline of topics in computer science and recommendations of best available books for each of those subjects along with a MIT challenge designed to help people learn to code on their own. It came up in discussion in Discord (during which someone shared all their CS notes via Google Drive!) and I know a lot of Obsidian devs are solo learning to code, so I wanted to share it with y'all.

Feature Requests

• The ability to open a ghost vault so Obsidian can be the default app for markdown files is getting a lot of traction. Here's a related request.
• There's a new feature request for improving how backlinks are rendered in live preview.
• It would be awesome if we could center the graph around our active note
• It would be nice if we could have a delete and always ask again option to compliment the "delete and don't ask again" button.
• Here's one for better pandoc citation style support.

Appearance

• Here's a new cite syntax that doesn't involve a bunch of HTML. It comes in snippet form but also is "core" in Sanctum, ITS and Shimmering Focus (at least).
• @viticci came up with a system to save rich links and display them as an interactive grid with thumbnail previews. It seems like it makes for an awesome dashboard.
• Cybertron got a facelift — Nick commissioned Cecilia May (creator of the award-winning Primary theme) to create the LYT Mode theme.
• Minimal 4.4 moved to SCSS, got a rewrite of all the documentation, and has very nice support for movie and tv show dashboards.
• Shimmering Focus v1.603 added a ton of features including built-in styling for supercharged links, gutter indicators for unresolved links, a new css-only admonitions, and some other fancy features.
• Ebullientworks removed the corner blockquote icon, got rid of strikethroughs for some data-task values in live preview (yaaay!) and truncates long folder names.
• Spectrum v1.1.1 got some bugfixes and lets users toggle titlebar text.
• Sanctum v0.6.0 got a bunch of print support, and supports the use of  >>> for paraphrases. There are also a bunch of new style settings, and some UI tweaks.
• ITS Theme has new Live Preview and Style Settings updates. It also has improved styling for slides, Cooklang, Fantasy Calendar, and Admonitions.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a script that will fetch movie and tv show metadata into your vault.

Guides

• Here's a guide that explains how to sync Obsidian on iOS via Rclone. With Rclone you can sync files to remote SFTP servers, WebDAV servers, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and many other providers.
• Here's a simple note-taking setup guide that uses Zettelkasten methodology.
• There's a new Contributed Video up on the Community Talks channel. It gives an in-depth look into use-cases for the co-citations algorithm in the Graph Analysis plugin. This is high on my list of things to try and figure out before spring.
• Here are two methods of creating a 'Game Master' screen in Obsidian, using a kanban board and the Obsidian sidebar.

Discussions

• I never thought I'd see another person in the wild who annotates their academic texts with "ORLY" when they come across something that seems sketchy. Here's Rob Heaton's guide on how to annotate, read, and summarize books to support actual learning. It was shared during a Discord discussion of different annotation methods.
• Here's a discussion on the forum about approaching and designing your PKM system.
• Here's a discussion in Discord about how to use Obsidian as a STEM researcher, another about using Obsidian for clinical medical notes and also some project managers discussing how they use Obsidian for work.
• There was some discussion about how to use Obsidian as a collective knowledge management tool, and it turns out that the folks over at Dendron are putting together a public registry for knowledge. Since Dendron is essentially an extension for Visual Studio Code, which is a text editor, I believe you should be able to use it with an Obsidian vault without too much trouble. It probably isn't seamless, though.
• Here's a discord discussion featuring @Leah explaining how she cleaned up and dealt with thousands of unread but potentially useful articles.
• Here's a really in-depth discussion with lots of examples of people sharing their use-cases for Obsidian.
• Here's a discussion about the value of the notes to self paradigm of note-taking. It's on Twitter, so it's a bit hard to parse, but I recommend reading the whole thread and poking around in the broader discussion, because it was very thought-provoking.

Ancillary Tools

• Here's a nice blog post from the folks at Readwise (which lets you sync highlights from Kindle and Pocket and Instapaper etc. into Obsidian, along with having spaced repetition features) about how to tag your highlights while you read. You can also add chapters to your highlights and combine them on the fly.
• Here's a manually curated aggregator of "timeless articles" and snippets of "short perspectives" that you can save off, take notes on, etc. It's called Read Something Great and seems pretty similar to The Browser (also hand-curated lists of 5 links, but a newsletter and skews toward "newer" things) or Refind (which uses machine learning to try to give you things you're more likely to enjoy).
• The ZoteroObsidianCitations add-on searches your Obsidian Vault and adds a tag to the corresponding items in your Zotero database. It basically adds colored tags to Zotero items that have associated Markdown notes in an external folder. Here's more about it from the forum.
• Here's a discussion about how to link to Zotero entries from Obsidian without worrying about exporting stuff.
• Here's a bot that tweets out a random block from your obsidian vault. It relies on Google Drive.
• Windows 11 users who find the lack of clock customization annoying, check out this awesome tool called ElevenClock.

Housekeeping

We're starting to see more startup CEOs and small companies asking for referrals to expert business consultants for Obsidian usage. I'm considering putting together a list of people willing to be contacted about this, probably to be hosted on the hub. If this is something you'd be interested in doing, please reach out and let me know.

You may have noticed the slightly new format of the Roundup's plugins section.  It turns out many people don't like rolling beta plugins and prefer to wait for them to enter into the "official store," but were having trouble getting alerts when that actually happened. As such, I'm experimenting with separating those out into two different lists. You might see the same plugins pop up twice in a row because one week they've been submitted and a later week they've passed code review.

This was made possible by the generous coding skills of my fellow moderators @argentum and @tzhou, who took pity on me and created scripts to collate some information coming from Github and some critical channels in Discord like the starboard and updates channels. This lets me focus on things that require a human touch, like dredging up interesting conversations on Twitter!

It definitely didn't mean that I spent less overall time on the Roundup 🤣

In more personal news, my son just started daycare. To celebrate, I'm getting ready for a major refactor of my vault to bring some of my older files in line with my newly developed "best practices." If there's anything you'd like me to write an article about or host a community talk for, let me know. I'll have my hands in the guts of my system, so it's a good time to showcase what I used to do, what I do now, and why  I'm changing it.

I'll try to set aside time for more writing about knowledge management if there's interest. Mostly I default to focusing on writing about obscure history and science over on my fiction + research newsletter, but I'm pretty open to answering questions about Obsidian if you have any.

• There's a really important discussion about the current state of the meta in regard to Obsidian's appearance, namely themes and CSS snippets.
• The Gems of the Year voting ended. You can see the winners by poking through the forum, but I imagine there will be a formal announcement soon. Usually, the developers like to contact the winners first.
• The Obsidian Community Talks YouTube channel now has a separate playlist for Contributed Videos, for folks who want to contribute a video to the Obsidian knowledge base but not necessarily deal with hosting their own YouTube channel and figure out discoverability, etc.

Obsidian Updates

• Insider v.0.13.18 has new hotkeys for in-document search and, copyable code blocks, and vim mode improvements.
• v0.13.19 has a couple of fixes that mostly won't be noticeable except as potential problems that might not happen anymore... as well as everything from Insiders 15-18.

Plugin News

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.

Community Plugins

These plugins went through code review and are now available in Obsidian's plugin list.

• Smarter Markdown Hotkeys by @chrisgrieser lets users select words and lines more effectively before applying markup. Multiple cursors are supported as well.
• Tomorrow's Daily Note by @frankolson creates tomorrow's daily note for pre-emptive planning.
• Indentation Guides by @mgmeyers adds vertical lines to the editor denoting indentation level of lists and other content. This moves the functionality out of themes and into a plugin, for easier support.
• Wrap with shortcuts by @manic Wrap selected text in custom tags with shortcuts.
• Native Scrollbars by @mgmeyers enables native OS scrollbars throughout obsidian.
• Plaintext by @dbarenholz allows opening specified files as plaintext (RAW mode).
• Metronome by @curtgrimes adds interactive metronomes to your notes.
• Emotion Picker by @dartungar lets users choose an emotion from a list to insert into a note.
• Vim IM Select by @ALONELUR supports auto selection the opposite input method in different vim mode.
• Global Hotkeys by @mjessome adds support for global hotkeys.

Pending (as of Friday morning)

Note: Most of these plugins are not yet 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 (BRAT). Note, though, that this is not as safe as waiting for them to go through code review.

• Phrasebank by @viktorbezdek  adds shortcodes with various prewritten phrases to improve quality and productivity of your writing.
• Local File Interface by @qawatake provides commands for moving files in and out of the vault
• Topic Linking by @liammagee can convert PDF files and web links to Markdown.
• Binary File Manager by @qawatake detects new binary files in the vault and create markdown files with metadata.
• Rule folder template by @daoif lets users create a new document from the template and place it in the folder of the specified rule.

Betas

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

• Remotely Save is an unofficial sync plugin allowing you sync your notes between local devices and third-party services. It works with S3, Dropbox, webdav, and OneDrive. It also supports mobile (including iOS) and e2e encryption, and I think it's designed to get around some annoying iCloud stuff.
• Here's a new plugin called BibNotes Formatter. It is designed for academics and the Zotero workflow, and should let users keep the literature notes on Obsidian updated when the data is changed in Zotero without the risk of losing the manual edits. It works with notes extracted both from the Zotero native pdf reader and via Zotfile.
• Obsidian Typograph v.0.0.6 has a new HTML parser and new ways to customize quotation marks.
• Obsidian Memos will recognize - HH:mm text or - [ ] HH:mm text in daily notes and pull them out into stuff like Big Calendar. It supports mobile and hotkeys.

Updates

• As of 0.3.2, inline rant-lang blocks now also markdown-parse the output.
• Version 1.7.0 of the Spaced Repetition Plugin supports note transclusion, audio & video in flashcards. It also got some bug fixes, and allows users to zoom into an image when clicking it. It's even been translated into German and Dutch!
• Metacopy now allows users to create a link based on a frontmatter key and a base value. Users can also disable the file and context menus using a frontmatter key.
• React Components 0.1.3 now supports Live Preview.
• Advanced Slides 1.3.0 allows users to export slides to html and got a bunch of bugfixes. 1.5.0 added a chalkboard, a menu plugin, and a bunch of settings.
• Various Complements v4.0.0 removed the Toggle Auto-complete command, added new ignore key options, allows users to load custom dictionaries, and more!
• Code Editor Shortcuts v1.4.1 got some bugfixes.
• Toggl Track Integration for Obsidian v 0.4.0  was focused on visualizing the Toggl track data inside of Obsidian.
• Quoth 0.2.0, which offers more flexible embedding. It lets users embed precise selections, inline embeds, and include author and title. There are some new buttons and better contextualization since the initial version, too.

For Developers

• There's a new github repository template for creating an Obsidian theme. It's designed to help people get started with theme development, similar to the Obsidian sample plugin. Feel free to submit more examples!
• Here's a graphical representation of the Obsidian API. Here it is as an svg. Here's the .puml file used to generate it.
• Theme Design Utilities 0.14 allows users to cycle between dark and light mode, as well as source, live preview, and reading mode, with a single hotkey.

Feature Requests

Last week, we discussed "shoot for the moon" ideas for exciting things the community would love to see in 2022. Here are some highlights from Discord.

• Revolutionize the landscape for markdown tables.
• Figure out real-time, multiplayer Obsidian.
• Improved database functionality, to make some of the key functionality of Dataview & Templater more accessible.
• Facilitate a bigger variety of view types for the graph, i.e. hyperbolic view.

Appearance

• ITS restyled some of the plugins, particularly breadcrumbs, Fantasy Calendar, Initiative Tracker and Indent Group.
• Wyrd 0.3.2 got some updates for Live Preview and styling for embeds.
• Prism v1.2.0 has a new system for customizing headers, along with a new wiki showcasing all the Style Settings options for the plugin.
• Sanctum v0.5.5 added indents to Style Settings sections, reworked headings to have pre-set color options, which makes it easier to pick a color scheme that fits with the theme's aesthetic, and made it so heading indicators are only visible on the active line.
• Shimmering Focus v1.550 got a bunch of improvements to support the longform plugin, as well as a much smaller file size and a bunch of fixes.
• Ebullientworks 0.2.6 got some improvements for using light theme to print, and a toggle for brightness & contrast of tags.
• Bubble Space Theme v1.4 has been updated for Live Preview and mobile. There's also some new plugin styling.
• Dracula Slim by @bLaCkwEw is new.

Guides

• Here's a neat forum post about relational databases in Obsidian.
• Here's a new video about Breadcrumbs and all the new features, as well as a showcase of the new Threading Mode from Breadcrumbs.
• Here's how you can manage tags in Obsidian like Bear.
• Here's a guide for daily notes plugin that comes with a downloadable vault for experimentation.
• Here's a video about using Obsidian as a high school student.
• Here's a nice guide about Obsidian and Pandoc.

Discussions

• Here's a great discussion about what worked for different people to help them get started with Obsidian. This video by Artem Kirsanov hadn't crossed my radar yet but comes highly recommended.

Ancillary Tools

• Here's a sample Airtable Database for Personal Knowledge Management
• The Raycast Obsidian extension now supports opening vaults, easy vault switching, and multiple vaults.
• Here's a writeup about the "future of search" as it relates to Semantic Search & Obsidian.