Obsidian October 2021 daily progress and learnings

Love the idea on ‘Hot Notes’, but don’t you have access to file timestamps? If so, you could color code based on that.

There is mtime and ctime, last modified time and creation time.

I could use that, but I’d still need to assign Tags or something to these Files so I can target them in the Graph View. mtime would also only change if one actually edits the file, not only if you view it.

I have an idea that would work without tags, will ping you on Discord.

And after my first theme, here’s my fist plugin - super simple but hopefully plenty useful: GitHub - tomzorz/obsidian-link-archive: Link Archive plugin for Obsidian

The plugin adds a new ribbon button that lets you submit every external link in your note to https://archive.org to save them, and then embeds an archive link in your note after each one. This way even if the original site goes down or gets deleted - you can still refer back to the content later.

6 Likes

So my plugin submission is now live in Community Plugins in Obsidian. Will be pushing out a minor update after some more testing:

one of the greatest parts of the process is getting feedback from the Obsidian crew. Always learning something, how to improve code and to simplify.

5 Likes

I’m working on my theme “Bubble Space”, taking the O_O event as the opportunity to complete the theme I’ve been using in my creatives vault.

The theme is inspired by Bubbles for light mode and Space for dark mode hence the name. There are still a lot of things to change and try :sweat_smile:

Below is my progress so far :running_woman:

Bubble [:sunny: Light Mode]

Space [:crescent_moon: Dark Mode]

6 Likes

Brand new user, and joining the party kind of late, but hoping to get the most out of the rest of October by focusing on this!!!

Project: Moss on Stone (A Theorem Proving Assistant for Obsidian)

Background: I started using Obsidian as a way to take smart notes for pure maths. I’m still iterating and improving on my workflow, but at the moment there are two basic types of notes: definitions, and propositions,. Each have a basic title, a short english description, a formalization, and optional additional descriptions.

So far I have gotten an immense amount of utility by seeing which definitions are linked to which theorems. The next natural step is to add notes which are proofs of the theorems, and devising a digital scratch pad/workflow that facilitates this.

Today I am just writing this post as a way of getting my initial thoughts out there and as a way to commit to this daily progress.

MVP Feature List:
3 panes

  • Main pane: has an input for hypotheses and conclusions and this is where we will be left to do symbolic manipulations and scratch work
  • Definitions pane: Lists all the definitions inside of the theorem, and all of their logically equivalencies. There should be some way of marking which definition is the main definition
  • Related theorems: Shows all of the theorems in your vault which make use of the definitions which you are using. Potential to organize them by hypothesis and conclusions split. Also some type of recommendation system for which theorem would be the most helpful would be totally, totally sick.

Notes:
-At the moment this is particular to my own note taking workflow (which is still in it’s infancy)
-Consulting Polya’s books on induction and discovery could provide good motivation.
-Getting some
-Getting a more concrete specification of which cognitive tasks (ex. memorization…) are involved in theorem proving would greatly improve this project’s scope (As well as make me a better mathematician, which is what this is all about)

Dreaming dreams spit ball list
-Mobile support
-Way out there (Using RegEx or AI in order to formalize written proofs and/or theorems into lean so as to verify that the proofs which we have written are in fact correct and rigorous)

6 Likes

Workspaces Plus plugin

Workspaces Plus is an Obsidian plugin that extends the functionality of Obsidians core workspaces feature (description from Obsidian help site).

This project is a collaboration between Johnny :sparkles: (UX Research and Design) and NothingIsLost (Design and Development).

Context

I was inspired to share this idea mockup for a workspace switcher menu after being frustrated by not knowing which workspace I was in. NothingIsLost saw the opportunity to develop this idea further with a fuzzy search modal using Obsidian Theme Picker by Kenset as inspiration.

Process

Our development process is mostly ad hoc with priority given to fixing bugs. We have been working asynchronously using Github’s issues and project boards.

We also shared a survey with the community (which you can fill out here) to gather feedback about how we can improve the workspaces experience in Obsidian.

I use Penpot to mock up most of my design ideas.

Challenges

Adopting the fuzzy search modal to use for workspace switching and other features lead to many small design challenges and bugs. Some examples include:

  • design challenge: should there only be one modal for switching workspaces or a modal and a switcher menu? (we opted for both to make switching accessible via mouse and keyboard)
  • design challenge: should edit and delete buttons be present when workspace rename input field is active? (we chose to hide them to reduce visual distraction)
  • bug: edit and delete icons would remain shown when they should be hidden upon switching from keyboard to mouse navigation in either menu

You can see all of the decisions we made in the closed issue section of our GitHub repo and current designs are being discussed in open issues.

Current State

Here is a brief overview of the current features of our plugin:

  • workspace signifier shows the workspace your are in
  • workspace switcher modal can be opened via hotkey
  • workspace picker can be opened by clicking on the workspace name (located in the status bar)
  • workspaces can be created, renamed, and deleted from either the switcher modal or picker menu
  • workspaces can be assigned to and opened with hotkeys

Future

  • per workspace metadata (on hold until API)
  • workspace modes
  • mobile accessibility

Retrospective

I feel that the most important thing I’ve learned while working on this project is the importance of paying attention to details in design. This is one of my first projects collaborating with a developer and being this close to development has not only made me appreciate the process more, but also given me a more thoughtful perspective when I make my designs. There are so many small interactions that, as a user, I would take for granted. Examples from this project include: the spacing of items in a menu, active hover states over focused buttons, the behavior of scrolling in a menu, and more. There’s a rationale behind all of these little design decisions and I’ve had great enjoyment learning how to craft a useful and usable user experience. - Johnny :sparkles:

4 Likes

I’ve officially made a PR for my theme, Cardstock!

It’s a relatively simple one, I aimed for it to be clean and to use as few color variations as possible to get it all set up. Check out the repo here:

And the PR here!

3 Likes

I’ve just published 0.2.0 with a TON of improvements Release 0.2.0 · tomzorz/obsidian-link-archive · GitHub :slight_smile:

2 Likes

So today I looked into Controlled Natural Languages, and played around with Colada (a CNL for the Calculus of Inductions)

with the hopes of having automatic formalization of my notes into LEAN.

Ultimately decided not to implement this into the plugin at the moment. It’s not being maintained and I don’t want to jump into maintaining it. I imagine my style of notes will eventually converge to a standard which wouldn’t be too hard to formalize, and having spent some time poking around Colada and the CNL lineage from which it came from I have various design ideas to play around with.

It should be noted that this formalization step is a sub problem of the whole proof scratch interface. I’m taking LEAN’s Natural Number’s Game as inspiration for this:

https://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/~buzzard/xena/natural_number_game/

The basic idea is that there would be the intro, and rewrite tactics (and potentially more as we go on), as well as basic inference rules that would be used to symbolically manipulate the proof, thus generating a (semi-formal) proof tree.

Next steps for me are to play around with Zotero, Obsidian, and Research Rabbit integration to a) get a better sense for how plugins work in Obsidian and b) take note on how I could potentially integrate these apps into my plugin.

2 Likes

So I’m working on a plugin - posted this about it over on discord yesterday (a few more details there too) as I decided to try and get it over the final hurdles for an initial release before the end of the month


Time to fess up to some plugin development activity! Basically, I’m working on a Kanban like plugin CardBoard. I started back in Feb and have been working on it sporadically since. Obsidian October has spurred me on to see if I can get it into shape to release into the wild. Ooh, and I am writing it in elm.

What does it do? Basically, it tracks regular markdown tasks in your vault and displays them on a (Kanban-like) board. It supports 2 types of board at the moment;

  • date based which works with the daily notes plugin (although you can use it without this if you add due dates to tasks), and
  • tag based where tasks will be shown in columns defined by #tags.

Anything indented under a task is interpreted as either notes or sub-tasks and displayed on the card.

It looks like this (with the Obsidian Nord theme)

Yesterday summary

more haste == less speed

I got the settings form done for the date-based board. I am (currently) handling this on the plugin page rather than using the standard obsidian plugin settings pages (so the plugin is more self contained and cause I prefer writing elm to typescript - and if I want to get it finished before the end of October…).

However, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work out why I couldn’t read the settings I’d written to disk - argggh! Should have spent more time understanding what I was doing rather than just blindly copying things and hoping for the best.

Better tests would have caught the problem too. Will be adding those today and then (hopefully) getting on with developing rather than debugging :smiley:

4 Likes

Hello once again everyone :smiley:

I just released the theme that I’ll be submitting for the Obsidian October Event named Golden Book (I know, pretty original, given the fact that my previous theme is named Golden Coffee… just bare with me XD).

Before anything, I want to say THANK YOU to everyone that helped me learn and improve my CSS skills and helped me build this theme (as well as the previous one). This “everyone” would be all of you, the ones that are active in the now “CSS-Theme-Snippets” channel, the Obsidian-October special channel, as well as the dedicated to CSS Obsidian Forums.

I really mean this, I’m not a very social person (or a very social person depending on who are you asking [ ._.]), more so in big environments like this Server. Being even a little part from something so big like this place it’s really something for me.

Thanks to everyone and to the Creators as well, you are the big ones ;D

Now, back to the theme: What’s new? Apart from all the appearance nuances that we all know, just a few thinks:

  • Asides - Little blocks at the left part of your document. It holds the information on a little box and shows it to you once you hover over it. Currently there are 5 types: Information, Important, Question, Check, Wrong
    • PD 1 : This types are the one that I usually use on my vault, is someone wants another type to be added to the theme, I’ll gladly add it. Just issue it on the GitHub :smiley:
  • H1 - H6 text instead of # - On Edit View you will see that there is no more a #'s on your headings, but a Hn (n being the header level you’re in)
  • Vertical Lines on OL and UL - As well as in Golden Coffee, there are vertical lines that shows the different levels of the lists. And there are some improvements that Golden Coffee still don’t have (I’ll add it there as well as soon as I have enough free time ._.):
    • No more sync-lag - In Golden Coffee there was a little bug/glitch that make writing notes on synced ones a real pain. Now, there is no bug/glitch (or whatever it’s called ._.)
    • Resizable - Its size varies with the font size as well :smiley:
  • Bullet Journal Tags - A series of icons that show depending of which type you are using. Currently there are 7: Canceled, Moved, Deferred/Scheduled, Question, Important, Add and Half done.
    • PD 2 : This types are the one that I usually use on my vault, is someone wants another type to be added to the theme, I’ll gladly add it. Just issue it on the GitHub :smiley:
  • Kanban Grid - Now, the lists will be shown in more that one row (depending on the numbers of lists that you have)
  • Apolo ◑.◑ - Our little companion that just… ◑.◑ (Literally, it’s just there, nothing more XD)

Once again, thank you so much for your attention, it’s been an honor

  • > Have a beautiful day

GitHub Repository
GitHub - kinmury/obsidian-golden-book: Just another normal theme for Obsidian, nothing new here ;D (Deprecated)

3 Likes

Hi all! I’ve put a couple of plugins in for OO:

Copy as Latex

Does exactly what it says on the tin - highlight some markdown in your note, call the command and it’s in your clipboard as Latex. I made it for the use case of doing most of the writing in Obsidian, but being able to easy copy/paste it into Overleaf.
(GitHub - mo-seph/obsidian-copy-as-latex: Quick plugin to be able to copy/paste from Obsidian/Markdown into a Latex document, pull request has just gone in)

Note from Template

I found I was writing lots of lists, where I then wanted each bit to become its own note. Note from Template lets you set up a collection of templates, each bound to a command, and convert highlighted text to bits of that template, and create a new note in a set folder. Slightly outdated demo:
image
(GitHub - mo-seph/obsidian-note-from-template: Simple plugin to create Notes from a template, and fill in fields defined there)

2 Likes

Hey everyone! My new theme Prism is now released :partying_face:
It’s now available in the Community Themes. All the information about the theme, how to install it, additional screenshots, etc. are available in the GitHub Repository.

The key focus of the theme was to create a highly-customisable and elegant theme. The initial release is about 95% way there and focused on covering the Core UI and Core Plugins of Obsidian. Some issues are expected.

I’ll keep working on it again starting Nov 1st (I’m away for the weekend). You are welcome to @ me with any issues or submit them in the Repo for me to get on with when I’m back.

(P.S. The theme requires Style Settings to function correctly. Information on how to install and enable it are in the Repo as well)

2 Likes

CardBoard plugin dev thoughts for the day

Learnings

  • As I get closer to done, I’m finding more things to do (arghhh).
  • Dealing nicely with a flexible user input scheme is quite hard.
  • If I didn’t have tests, building parsers and decoders in elm would take considerably longer and be way more error prone.

Progress

  • Made sure I updated the current board view with new settings when closing the settings dialog.
  • Added versioning to the plugin settings to allow seamless changes to how/what I put in there in the future.
  • Completed TagBoard settings. Point 2 in learnings above meant it took a while as I wanted an easy and flexible way of entering the tags which define the columns that wouldn’t break.
  • To be honest, I assumed I’d be a lot further along than I am. I expected to have the settings stuff done comfortably today. No doubt cause I am just ploughing through without too much pre-thought.

Been a good day tho as I’ve got some hard (for me anyway) things done :smiley:

2 Likes

Just a quick notice/reminder: submit your O_O contributions at the form found on the Obsidian October hub page!

https://publish.obsidian.md/hub/01+-+Community/Events/Obsidian+October+2021

1 Like

CardBoard Summary for Today

Learnings

  • CSS Grid is just totally fab for laying out things!
  • I have had to take on some tech debt in order to get this done, so after the initial release I am going to have to spend some time tidying up behind me before I add any more features.
  • I can be really fussy about how things look and work (I knew that anyway).

Progress

  • Finished the initial version of the settings dialog and handling.
  • Now handles board creation, editing, and deleting.
  • Completed all the functionality I intend to have built for the initial release.
  • Next step: to make it a better obsidian citizen.
3 Likes

During OO I have been able to finish three mobile-focused projects! :partying_face:

Obsidian You :art:


The flagship project. A theme completely designed around mobile.

  • Dynamic Colour
  • Floating Action Button
  • Dark Mode

Obsidian You Repo

Auxillary tools

  • :iphone: Set Mobile Theme: Load a separate theme for Obsidian on Desktop and on Mobile.

  • :full_moon_with_face: Luna – Dark Mode Helper: An Obsidian Plugin that switches into Dark Mode based on time or sun position, supporting Mobile.

2 Likes

CardBoard summary for today

Learnings

  • @marcusolsson’s documentation is awesome
  • The obsidian community is cool - already got some useful stuff on github issues :slight_smile:
  • BRAT is awesome (thank you @TfTHacker )

Progress

  • Plays better with obsidian - view is now properly registered (see first learning).
  • Fixed bug with settings not being saved in the plugin (only to disk).
  • Realised I wasn’t tracking changes to file or directory names. Now I am.
  • WroteMe a ReadMe.
  • Worked out how to release (will be submitting tomorrow).
  • Did a beta release and checked it works with BRAT (it does - fabulous).
  • Much tidying, cleaning up, and getting readier things (although not sure what a reviewer will think of my typescript as I’ve not given it much love).

Wasn’t sure I’d get everything done in time, so feeling happy that I’ve managed somehow (through deft use of the ‘putting less important things off till later’ technique).

4 Likes