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2021-07-17: Obsidian Mobile, Community Events & Graph Tips

I'm doing an AMA. There's a new plugin for better logseq/obsidian interoperability. QuickAdd macros are incredible. TTRPG stuff & new themes!

Eleanor Konik
Written by Eleanor Konik

I write stories & articles inspired by all eras of history & science... so I wind up putting notetaking software like Obsidian & Readwise thru their paces.

6 min read.

In The Community

  • I’ll be joining Nick Milo for the inaugural LYT House feature, with a grand reveal of my (sanitized) vault for people to see. We’ll probably talk about managing writing projects and tasking, but the thing I’m most excited about is the 30-minute “Ask Me Anything” portion. It’ll be held on Zoom at 10AM PT (UTC-7) on Sunday, July 18th.
  • If you have ideas to improve the Obsidian documentation, you can contribute to the process of documenting Obsidian on GitHub.
  • @nickmilo shared this really heartwarming Love Letter to Obsidian that some Discord users recorded made them tear up a bit.
  • Paul Bricman is organizing a free one-day online “unconference” about building tools for thought. Participants host their own sessions. It’s on July 25th. Learn more here.
  • @Silverica is looking for community members interested in contributing T-shirt designs for Obsidian merch 👀 Details on Discord.

Obsidian Updates

The big news this week is that obsidian for mobile has released! This brought a whole host of questions about best practices and methods for syncing files between different devices. I’ve put together a meta list of all the resources for sync and advice I was able to find.

Incidentally, if startup feels like it’s taking too long, try:

  • lock the app so that it doesn’t get killed.
  • let the app run in the background.
  • check to see if your plugins are causing long load times.
  • Make sure you don’t have any “markdown” files that are actually long files of another type, like xml. This can sometimes cause the parser to choke.
  • Make sure you don’t have any illegal characters in your filenames. Different operating systems have different requirements, but ? and % have been common culprits.

Insiders will continue to get access to early beta builds and features.

Plugin News

New

This plugin makes Obsidian’s preview of LogSeq-flavored markdown more pleasant.

Updates

  • The Excalidraw plugin has a nice video walkthrough of the big 1.2.1 update:  This is a major release moving Excalidraw to Markdown and implementing linking, transclusion, aliases, tagging, backlinking, etc. feature set into Excalidraw.
  • Breadcrumbs 0.8.15 now has a grid view and is in the community plugins list now after getting through code review. I am very excited to start using this to mimic folgezettels, personally.
  • File Tree Alternative version v.1.2.7allows users to use keyword all: which helps with searching all files under the vault rather than the currently active folder.
  • Imgur Plugin 2.0 now allowed users to authenticate and upload images tied to their account.
  • QuickAdd 0.3.5 adds support for inline JavaScript execution. It also supports syntax highlighting out of the box.
  • Advanced-URI now supports opening files by UUID.
  • Version 0.3.0 of Amazing Marvin plugin adds a ribbon, more support for bringing tasks into your daily notes in Obsidian, and more customizations.
  • the Obsidian Initiative Tracker plugin lets you add players, create homebrew creatures, and run a combat from within Obsidian, and includes the full 5e SRD creature list.
  • Linux-only: The Ulauncher plugin for obsidian now supports direct access to Daily Note and Quick Capturing.

Under The Radar

  • For those who have gotten used to the handy way that the mobile toolbar can cycle between - and - [ ] and - [x] don’t forget that Hotkey++ exists and lets you do something similar on desktop.

For Developers

Workflow Stuff

Appearance

  • The new Illusion Theme (optimized for light mode) is absolutely gorgeous. Its primary benefit is that things are a bit bigger with better contrast.
  • California Coast got some major updates including better mobile support.
  • A couple of people have asked for a “Getting Started” guide for making CSS themes for Obsidian. Reggie has one over on Publish.
  • @mgmeyers shared a method to define the shape of icons using css and web-mask-image that will work a bit better than aria-labels to replace svgs. This lets theme developers swap out icons without needing users to download the icon swapper plugin and download icon files, which should let theme developers do more with icons on mobile too.
  • If you want a custom font on mobile, you can Base64 encode the font into your theme. You can't refer to other files from css snippets directly - relative links won't work there because the files are loaded as a blob instead. Once you’ve encoded the font, copy it into the theme file and change fonts wherever you want either in the theme file itself or through one of the plugins.
  • @chetachi shared a neat way to highlight the active line of a bullet point list using relationship lines.
  • the Everforest theme has been updated
  • There’s a new theme called darkyan.

Knowledge Management

Ancillary Tools

Housekeeping

  • I am still sorting through the survey stuff. It's been a heck of a week. I'm really sorry if you didn't get an email about the mobile release on Monday and you wanted one. I really wasn't expecting that whole process to go quite as badly as it did, and I couldn't bring myself to send a third email. This has definitely been a learning experience for me 😅 Thanks for bearing with me!

Note: There are a couple of affiliate links & codes scattered around, but these always come from links I was already recommending and usually I share them because they benefit you too (i.e. getting you extra time on trials).

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