NEW | Obsidian Insiders Release 0.9.10 | Plugins & Official API

Key Takeaways

[Music] welcome back everyone if you're new here my name is brian jenks and recently obsidian released version 0.9.10 to insiders so this is not a publicly available release but since i am a vip supporter i get early releases and i'm here to show you some of the new things that we got some shiny new toys so a lot of these latest releases have been kind of like a staccato of just more changes more things more more shiny toys to play with and it's mostly revolving around the new api release so obsidian now has a developer api so people can now develop officially supported plugins instead of using one of the you know appreciated but janky systems we were just injecting javascript code to do some plugins with obsidian so now there's actually an official api there's documentation there's even templates out there for people to just pick up and write some typescript and create their own plugins for obsidian and today i'm going to show you some of the ones that i use and how you can get these going and use them if you at least right now have the insider's release or give a few weeks and when this release goes public then it will be available to anybody for free so let's take a look at these plugins and how you get them and let's jump into obsidian so in obsidian there is now a new menu i'm going to open up settings you can do it by the gear here i just use hotkeys for everything and we're going to open up our settings and now if you have this new insider's release you can see i'm up to date this is november october 31st halloween so 9.10 is what i'm currently using the latest bleeding edge and we have third-party plug-ins here now there are plug-ins that come standard with obsidian that you can turn on and off but these are the ones that actually come from other people developers people that are not part of the core developing team of obsidian clicking here normally you'll be greeted by a menu of just search for plugins and you need to turn off safe mode now before you freak out and panic this is really just hey do you want your obsidian vault to be more secure because there is no absolutely secure option for anything if you wanted to be more secure you don't want to run code written by people who are not obsidian developers but if you accept that risk of running other people's code which you know if it's a a commonly used plugin it's probably safer than just some plugin that only has one user then you're going to turn off safe mode this will let you use these third-party plug-ins now we need to add some i have some here but let's see how we add them you won't see any of these so you're going to click browse because you want some you want some plug-ins so clicking browse will actually show you this list of plugins here in the community vault i'm not quite sure how they're building this vault it may just be the github tags of obsidian dash md but we'll check that out but they are currently ordered by the amount of downloads you can see the top one right now is the calendar plugin and followed by the sliding panes which you know i also use andy mode is what you've probably heard it referenced as and i use this probably since day one in any case clicking on one of these plugins will actually show you the readme it's actually the readme of the github repo as well as some details about it such as you know the amount of downloads what version you currently have installed and the most up-to-date version in the repo so in this case you can actually update from this menu as well no dealing with manual installations or source code file management or whatever you just click update in the interface if that's cool with you it's not really any reason to do it manually unless there's something explicit about that but in any case there's also links to these repositories so you can go and check out the source code for yourself let's click on this one just to see so what's probably being picked up is these tags in github of obsidian-md or dash plugin and this is probably how they're scraping github for these community plugins now that doesn't mean that they're absolutely safe to use right off the bat you still have to use caution but if they have a lot of downloads and they're pretty popular in the community they're more likely to be safer and more secure than something you just download off the internet in some random corner that no one uses so once you actually see these plugins you're like hey i want that so you're going to click instead of update it would say install for you it's update if you use a new version or you can also uninstall these plugins if you wanted to get rid of them so i already have several of these plugins installed i'm going to show you what some of them do just because hey let's check out what some of these great developers are doing and what they've created so what does this all mean what this means is that anybody can develop plugins for obsidian you want to extend its functionality you are now able to do that and it has a public and well-documented api so in this case if you can write some typescript you can actually develop plugins and custom functionality for obsidian and some of the stuff coming out of this is already amazing and i'm going to show you a few of these plugins that have been developed by the obsidian community so let's check out some of what we have here and what i have installed already so if you've seen my obsidian videos and seen some of what i do in here you know by now that i'm a real big fan of andy mode or the sliding panes popularized by andy matushak and his working notes i'll probably put a link to that in the description or the pin comment it's a really interesting and awesome way of seeing your notes laid out on a quote unquote table which sort of helps with the the drawback of using digital versus analog note cards for a zettle coston system and what this means is instead of being able to spread out my physical index cards on a desk i can actually use sliding panes in my you know obsidian editor and actually see my quote-unquote cards laid out on my quote-unquote desk so what this looks like is hey i'm going to look at my interests then programming then c plus plus and you can see as i start to begin opening up these notes i have them all here i can just slide right right past them i can see them all laid out on my desk i can collapse these panes i can get a better working view i can scroll through some of this stuff and i can have it all laid out and these titles are actually horizontal now and if i have a lot of these different notes open so i can just keep opening up some more notes and let's get some let's get a lot of these open so if i open up a bunch of stuff actually this might be good what happens if i click the first one all the panes rush back and collapse onto the opposite side typically in the css we had which was a little bit more of a hacky version of this and what we had to do is all of these would be just lost on the right side so you'd actually have to scroll through all of them whereas now with the plug-in they actually collapse on the right side as well as the left so in this this is andy mode and with this now i have all the functionality i need to have everything laid out and i really enjoy this when i'm writing my notes i might have my literature notes on the left hand side and as i make my little seedlings and generate new idea notes i will open those up in new panes to the right and then i'll just have the whole working session out and open in one single editor which is all these idea notes open over here and the main literature notes where i got them from in this case i can just link and flesh out and nest all of these things together before i plant them in my main vault the next plugin i'm going to show you is white space so in vim i really liked white space highlighting seeing the carriage returns spaces and tab characters all represented i also turned this on in rstudio and i really like this plugin currently it still breaks something for me with my task css code but when that's fixed i still intend to use this but what it looks like previewed is in edit mode you can actually see these carriage returns and if you did spaces they appear as dots and if you did tabs they're arrows and i really enjoy seeing white space highlighted like this i like knowing everything that's going on in the document it may not be for you but it's a very simple plugin and it's made by the exact same individual who made andy mode which is well the username is death underscore au i'm not sure he wants his real name out there or not but really awesome developer really nice guy so do check out his work another one of my favorite new plugins is a calendar plug-in now when this came out i thought hmm do i have a use for that turns out i do and i really actually enjoy this so the calendar plug-in looks at your daily notes so if you use the daily notes plugin i have you know my whole journal and it's just a bunch of daily notes i link them all together i have templates for that but what i really like about this plugin is that with this visual representation of dots it actually tells you how active you were in writing on that day of the week so in this day you can see that you know i tend to write a good amount in my daily notes if we go through the past you can see some days i missed and some of them are not so active but what i really like about this plugin is that it actually shows you you know the active day and then the days you don't have notes for so this way you can easily say okay next sunday that's tomorrow i don't have a note for that day obviously because it's not sunday the first i click on it it'll actually tell me hey there's no note for that day do you want to make it and when you do make it it'll actually use your template for your daily note and start it for you so if you want to say hey three days from now i want to start my day off with reminding myself with these tasks if you do task management in obsidian i don't but if you do this could be a great way for you to say hey remind myself in three days when i do my daily note here's all your stuff waiting for you because you already made it in advance and personally what i have set up for my template here is um i don't think the functionality is quite there yet so i just have an alfred snippet that i run where i just do a comma date and then it does the prior day and then the current and the current day is today and then the next day so i can only run this on the current day so it's not going to be valid here but in this case i love this plugin because it'll tell me hey you missed a day on um you know this month you can see i missed the 14th and the 18th i could go back and flush those out i'm not going to but i could and this plugin makes it incredibly easy to see a date you might have missed one thing i like about a lot of these plugins is that they're not trying to do too much a lot of the time a lot of times just little tiny pieces of granular functionality and i really appreciate that because it means that things are a lot less likely to step on other plugins toes but one thing i really really like is this new plugin for paste link if you do hyperlinks and you use the markdown syntax for them which you know i do i have some custom css also from death au i'm not sure he wants his name out there but i actually use this custom css to shorten the links and just display a little emoji but i have a hyperlink and i want to make a markdown note but i don't want to type bracket bracket paren paren and then do deal with all that i just want to say hey um here's the this text and i want to i have a link in my clipboard i just want to paste that link and make a markdown link so with this if i do control v that doesn't work obviously because that just pastes over but with the paste link plugin i can do command shift v and now that text is inside of a markdown link and then the link is there now perfectly formatted and i think that is really awesome and that is the uh paste url into selection plugin very very useful all right so i'm only going to talk about two more of these plugins there's many more and there's likely many many more coming but well i'm going to talk about two more another fun one is just read time you know if you ever go on like medium.com or some of these other article websites you'll see like two minute read how does it know that because it probably calculates an average word per minute reading time and then counts how many words are in the document with this plugin you can actually set that if you know your word per minute reading count then you can easily just go and set a custom setting for this plugin so reading time and in reading time as it defaults to 200 you know if i'm speed reading i can do like up to 500 or 550 but with this you can actually set your reading time and then here in the bottom of the status bar it'll actually tell you hey this note you're on is a two minute read i just find it really interesting and honestly for me it's more of just like eye candy so i want it but i think it's really useful especially if you want to know exactly how long it's going to take you to reread something or how much you're going to make somebody else read i think it's a really useful plugin the last plugin i'm going to cover is not one that i use personally but one that i think many other people would benefit from using especially those that are not quite as technically inclined so obsidian git is a way of managing your vault with version control in github so i currently don't use this because i actually recently wrote an article on medium about using git for version control on an obsidian vault and how to set up everything your credentials set up your vault put the script into make the script what the script does every single line because you should never run a shell script without understanding what it does ideally so i explain everything about what this does and then how to set it up in a cron job and then all i have to do personally all i have to do is i just have to edit my files and then if i go to another computer like if i go to my work computer and i access code spaces on github and i you know edit my file on github when i get home it's already going to be pulled into my local repository for my vault and my changes are on any machine i can access them anywhere anytime and they're constantly synced and i really enjoy this because in one you have version control you have redundancy and you're never gonna have to worry about losing it and you can keep this in a private repo so i wrote this really comprehensive write-up about this i posted it in the obsidian forum and even on the repo for this uh plug-in it even references my article so you can do this just with the command line just with you know git and cron and those tools and personally that's how i choose to do it because that is what i'm familiar with and i know exactly what to fix when things go wrong but if you just want something that just works what you can use is obsidian-git and this is supposed to i haven't set this up so don't take my word as gospel here but you i'm guessing you set up a repo and then you put your obsidian vault into that repo and then it will provide you an interface and some options in here so if i turn this plugin on there is now obsidian dash git here for customization for plugins and then you can give it a custom message you can put it on a branch pull updates on startup a lot of this stuff that you might want to keep your vault up to date and under version control so i personally haven't set this up i'm going to make a video on my git workflow for version control on the vault and hopefully that will help some people but this is an option available to those who don't want to have to deal with all of that you know technical junk so these are some of the amazing plugins that are coming out of the community and there's many more to come this is a insider's release right now it's not publicly available but with the iteration cycle of these amazing developers on obsidian it's likely coming soon and you're going to enjoy the fruits of the labors of so many other developers if you'd like to keep up to date on what i'm doing and talk to me about any of this stuff you can join my discord server the link to that is in the description below if you'd like to support the channel you can do that via patreon donations or buying through any of the affiliate links whatever you'd choose to do and just watch the videos and a quick shout out to the patrons who support this channel before we go thank you devon alberto klaus brendan john and ed thank you all for supporting the channel and i'll catch you all in the next one [Music] so [Music] you