Markdown Highlighter – From Dynalist to Roam Research to Obsidian

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1

Hey everyone! :wave:

Back in the time before bi-directional links, Dynalist was my daily companion. Every week I looked into the forum, to see what others were thinking and how they were using Dynalist. It then occurred to me, that a good web highlighter was missing in the ecosystem. I took some time over Christmas in 2019 to build a solution for that under the name Dynalist Highlighter.

Forward some month and I stumbled upon Roam Research. I immediately fell in love with the simple idea of bi-directional links and pulled all my notes over. A good Web Highlighter was even more needed for Roam, then for Dynalist. So I took that as an opportunity to completely rewrite the Highlighter and to add new features. A couple of weeks later I published the Roam Highlighter. (The name leads to a bit confusion with roam-highlighter, another great extension by Murf)

I know that some Obsidian users are already using my extension. But I want to a formally share it here in the forum and put it up for discussions and ideas. I’m currently working towards making the extension the perfect companion for apps using the Markdown Format (Obsidian, Roam, Dynalist, Notion, Bear etc.). That’s my big priority. Making it highly compatible with Obsidian sounds only logical to me.

Therefore I would be super happy if you try out the extension and to let me know how I could do just that! I’m here for feedback, ideas and to learn more about your workflows in Obsidian.

But enough talking. Here you can find the extension:

Roam Highlighter Download (Chrome Web Store)

Feature highlights (pun intended):

  • Freely customise the format of your web highlights
  • Use placeholders from automatically extracted metadata (e.g Published Date, Author)
  • Fast, intuitive and user-friendly UI (Even dark mode! Wow…)

Tutorial Video (4:31 min)

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I think there’s quite a difference between a Markdown highlighter and a Roam highlighter. I think that if you want users of many different apps to consider it you might need to think about the name.

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Good point and that is on my list! I need to invest a bit more time into development to make the extension work smoothly on all platforms, but when that is the case I will change the name to something more generic.

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Is it possible to add an option in this extension for treating line-breaks as actual line-breaks? Not nesting them or turning them into bullet points or whatever. It is the only annoying problem I have with this extension. Other than that it’s awesome.

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