2021-07-31: Leveraging Graphs, a QuickAdd guide, & Plugin Changelogs

Community Events

• @NickMilo is hosting a live event tomorrow,  Sunday, August 1 at 10:00 AM PDT / 17:00 UTC to roll out version 5 of the LYT kit. You can ask & upvote questions for Nick to answer. Find out more from this Twitter thread.

Obsidian Updates

Insider 0.12.12 has arrived. Here are the highlights:

• There is now a search bar to find core plugins better.
• You can now use the keyboard to navigate and select context menus.
• There is now a YAML frontmatter flag for publish:. This flag affects the UI when uploading files to your publish site.

Plugin News

New

• Plugin Changelogs allows you to view the plugin changelogs right in Obsidian with a little Button next to the Update Button.

Updates

• The Advanced Toolbar Plugin now allows you to change all Toolbar Icons.
• Tracker v1.9.0 lets users create pie charts. There are also some breaking changes involving {{sum}}.
• Initiative Tracker 2.0.0 adds support for creating & encounters directly in your notes.
• Media Extended v2.9.0 Update adds timestamp template, option to blur on pause for Youtube videos, bilibili support, and embed size control and better options for player controls.
• Tasks version 1.2.0 lets users filter by recurring, can hide more stuff, and more.

For Developers

• @Licat strongly recommends using Editor when possible rather than directly using cmEditor because Editor is an abstraction that bridges the gap between Codemirror 5 & 6, and Codemirror 5 stuff won’t work on mobile. You can read the full discussion on Discord
• @Licat also recommends avoiding using basePath directly, and here’s more about why.

Workflow Stuff

• @NickMilo shared a great live notetaking session that includes how he uses the graph view to become a better thinker.
• If you didn't see @tallguyjenks 's four-hour note-taking extravaganza for how he handles basically everything about his Zettelkasten system, you should really check it out. It is exceedingly comprehensive and everyone I've talked to about it says they found it really useful.
• @Christian shared a blog post on a couple of different ways to use QuickAdd, with examples! There’s also a really nice video.
• Did you know that YAML supports multiline strings?
• @ichmoimeyo shared three showcase videos for the mobile app they found useful. One, Two, Three
• There was a discussion about how to use Obsidian on a Chromebook.
• You can Update Obsidian by Voice with Dropbox, Google Assistant, & IFTTT

Showcases

• @markmcelroy is planning to write a novel using Obsidian, a chapter a day, in public. He’s going to share access to his notes as he goes; backstories, outlines, and commentary. Find out more.
• @trulymavical has a GitHub repository for Obsidian resources including their daily note template, which they shared in a video about how they use daily notes as their bullet journal.
• obsidian.garden is an open-source guide to creating your own Digital Garden with Obsidian. It’s heavy on emojis but can be cloned via git or downloaded as a zip file to become a sort of starter vault.

Feature Requests

• @ontheexam created a feature request for a plugin that lets you assign (for example) hotkey defaults that match your muscle memory from various programs, for example Ulysses or Drafts.
• @bazcurtis (and I) would love a plugin that automatically updates YAML metadata with a "last-edit" date. For those of us who don't trust dataview's mtime & want to see it in edit mode ;)

Appearance

• The community showcase for @SlRvb’s Image Adjustment CSS Snippet is live on the Obsidian Community Talks channel.
• Did you know you can set the alt text of embed with a | pipe, i.e. [image.jpg|alt text]
• @SlRvb shared CSS snippets to emulate admonitions on Obsidian publish. It’s not as fully featured as the plugin, but it’s a nice alternative for folks who don’t want to feel locked into the plugin and prefer pure CSS/HTML.
• @chetachi shared how to set different icons based on file type using [data-type$(file type here)]

Knowledge Management

• the LYT kit has been translated into Chinese.

Ancillary Tools

• Prettier is a nifty code formatter that is opinionated and can clean up not only programming languages like Typescript, but also markdown and YAML. It works with Emacs, Vim, Sublime Text, and VS Code.
• Folks who use Zettlr on top of Obsidian files for stuff like the Pandoc integration: Zettlr 2.0 is entering beta.
• Here’s a nice free resource for learning git.