Some 'newbie' feature requests

Feature requests
1

Obsidian User Experience Improvements for Newbies**

As someone new to Obsidian, and unfamiliar with coding and apps like Notion, I’ve encountered challenges which prompted some ideas to enhance the user experience.

  1. In-built Interactive Tutorial

Issue:
On downloading and initiating a new vault, beginners often find themselves lost and overwhelmed, prompting them to look for tutorials externally.

Proposed Solution:

Launch an official Obsidian Community Project on GitHub to create an interactive step-by-step tutorial.
Utilize existing Obsidian documentation as the foundation for this tutorial.

Introduce an optional “TUTORIAL VAULT” in the “create vault” menu.

Note: Keeping in mind the open-source nature of Obsidian and the business interests of content creators, this could be a basic guide for newcomers, allowing specialized guides to be handled by creators.

  1. Enhanced Plugin Management

Issue:
New users, while exploring the plugins, often end up downloading multiple plugins simultaneously, leading to unintentional UI or settings changes, and difficulties in reverting.

Proposed Solution:

Introduce a “:star:” option for each plugin in the community plugins menu to bookmark and review later.

Offer a “Settings History List” that tracks every change made, whether it’s due to a plugin, theme, or manual adjustment.
When a theme overrides a core setting, dim the core setting with a quick link to the currently active setting.

  1. Improved Plugin Documentation

Issue:
While many plugin creators provide instructions, they often assume a certain level of familiarity which might not be present in all users.

Proposed Solution:

Standardize a more detailed and newbie-friendly documentation format on GitHub for plugin creators.

Encourage creators to link to their “plugin showcase” thread in the Obsidian forum or Reddit.

Include visual aids like videos or GIFs for clearer understanding.

Hyperlink or offer hover previews for technical terms like YAML or CODE BLOCK, directing to Obsidian Docs or a brief explanation.

Side note:
My experience with Obsidian - 6 months ago, I downloaded Obsidian. Created my first vault, and was so overwhelmed. …So I didn’t touch it again until a month ago.

This past month, I have taught myself enough to kickstart and be confident within the app. And of course still learning something new everyday!

I am so glad I kept at it, Without even realising it, learning markdown basics, has been the gateway to exploring more into a bit of coding !

Over 100 links of posts and YouTube tutorials I accumulated throught this experience, Thanks to all the creators, sharing their tidbits. Great community!!

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2

This is very specific use case and I don’t think it’s very elegant view since there are potentially hundreds of lines making the view useless and unproductive. See plugin ideas section.

This is useless feature since you can make tasks and query them later using tags-based filtering.

Example:
- [ ] explore and experiment Templater plugin #plugins
see Basic formatting syntax - Obsidian Help

then search: task-todo:#plugins
see Search - Obsidian Help
Note that when you check the task as done then your task disappears from the task-todo search. I recommend having a note titled “obsidian plugins exploration” where you put tasks related to plugin exploration.

3

Great suggestions @A-LeiSh_A !

I have added links to the forum discussion threads into each of my plugins - that’s a really good idea :+1:

2 Likes
4

Nice ideas!

5

Please make a separate feature request for each suggestion so they can be tracked and discussed more easily. Thanks!

6

While this IS under the help you linked, this doesn’t actually function the way OP is asking. Making a checkbox* for every single plugin you want to check out later – out of thousands of plugins, many of which you’re being linked to (or having to type in again because you were linked to GitHub instead) from Reddit or Medium etc…

…and then remembering (bc they don’t have Task Manager or Reminder or any of that yet!) to query them, while learning and recalling the terms to do that, just to remember which ones they are – and not even get linked to the plugin, just be reminded which ones you wrote down as a task?

Well, that’s what I’d call inelegant. Relative to a star option that will just bring up your favorites? I trust the Obsidian devs to be able to implement that on a list system. Save for later/favorites/wishlist are pretty standard coding and even a “share to note → choose note” option that includes the link straight to the community plugin would be better (because it’s hard for brand new users to find that).

I definitely have also wanted this before (as someone who is constantly finding reason to make and remember I had a note about what plugins I wanted to try out).

*while learning how to make checkboxes, which isn’t as easy as it seems – I literally, despite knowing some Markdown already and easily figuring out a lot of the rest/instituting plugins that allowed me to get away with it, just realized that my checkboxes weren’t working because I tried to type the - [ ] all at once without letting the bullet render first…like LAST WEEK after months of using Obsidian, and I can now just type them without copying and pasting/using a shortcut)

NOTE:

I would suggest to @A-LeiSh_A that they submit these feature requests separately, however. If the devs are looking for what people want, this kind of list may not be useful, and similarly if people are looking to upvote ideas, they can’t choose just one or know what’s in here until they open the thread, which isn’t ideal.

Side note: to A-LeiSh_A: If you are getting familiar with the advanced search parameters linked in the response, I’m going to point out here that “query” is, in case it threw you, the same as “search” because you said you were unfamiliar with coding and I’m going to guess associated lingo; honestly, it momentarily puzzled me (partly, because you’d have to have the Dataview plugin to do what I thought he was saying) until I read more closely even though I know that’s technically what you do on Google, not just…SQL and such.

It’s also not NECESSARY to search that way just to explore plugins: I’ve been using Obsidian for months and I don’t think I’ve ever used those functions. There are plugins for most of them, Tasks/Reminders being one of the simplest, IF you even find yourself searching your own data at all. Obsidian already has this weird myth of being developer/programmer-exclusive without making it feel like you ought to know all the advanced searches before you even start.

You can use it any way you want to.

I also WOULD take blue_emperor’s advice to explore both Obsidian help (basic syntax, etc) and plugins – I have a folder where I learned and played with Markdown and test things out in notes – but this solution? Way more complex than this feature request.

7

Oops, sorry – didn’t see the following ask that they (sorry, don’t know your gender!) list these separately already.

8

@blue_emperor “Useless” is needlessly harsh and not even true. If you omit the judgment, you get a more civil tone with no loss of information:

You can do this by making tasks and querying them later using tags-based filtering.

2 Likes
9

If you mean a feature to add plugin to your existing bookmarks, then this is problematic since (1) you don’t want extra clutter to your bookmarks so that your existing bookmarks can remain effective and useful and (2) bookmarks are designed to be productive to semi-productive feature and plugin exploration isn’t part of a productive work flow.

BUT

This is the elegant feature that we are looking for. As you said, posting these ideas as separate feature requests will increase the likelihood of further action from the staff.

10

Thanks for providing personal language guidance! You are truly invaluable person in this community :slightly_smiling_face:

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