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🇰🇷 South Korea /Culture & Society

Let's Mine Obsidian: Combining Obsidian and AI - Part 6

From Hankyoreh · () Korean

Translated from Korean, summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

In-depth Sources not specified Context piece
  • The article explains Obsidian plugins, comparing them to smartphone apps, and categorizing them into core and community plugins.
  • It details how to install and configure community plugins, emphasizing the need for caution and backups.
  • The author highlights three specific plugins, Omnisearch, Templater, and Excalidraw, and explains their functionalities for organizing information and streamlining writing tasks.

This article serves as the final installment of a series on learning Obsidian, focusing on the crucial aspect of plugins. It likens Obsidian plugins to smartphone applications, dividing them into "core" plugins developed by Obsidian and "community" plugins created by external developers. The piece guides readers through the process of enabling core plugins, stressing that users should activate only those they need. For community plugins, it advises careful consideration of descriptions, download counts, update dates, and developer activity before installation, recommending backups for important "bolts" (likely referring to vault data).

Obsidian is the smartphone body, and plugins are the apps.

— Reporter Lee Ju-hyeonExplaining the concept of plugins by comparing them to smartphone applications.

The author then introduces three specific community plugins chosen by reporter Lee Ju-hyeon for their utility in research and writing: Omnisearch for enhanced search capabilities, Templater for automating repetitive tasks, and Excalidraw for visual thinking. Omnisearch is presented as a powerful tool that expands Obsidian's native search, capable of searching within attached documents like PDFs and DOCX files, and even performing OCR on images. However, it requires an additional plugin, Text Extractor, and specific indexing configurations within Omnisearch for full functionality. The article acknowledges the setup can be cumbersome but highlights its convenience, citing an example of successfully searching for information within a press release. A crucial caveat is mentioned: Text Extractor's development is currently inactive, meaning text extraction may fail for some files, necessitating the preservation of original search methods for critical data.

You can search the body of attached documents, including some PDFs, images, and DOCX files.

— Article textDescribing the enhanced search capabilities of the Omnisearch plugin.

Templater is introduced as an advanced tool for creating templates, going beyond Obsidian's built-in functionality. It allows for dynamic content insertion, such as dates, file titles, creation/modification dates, user prompts, and automatic template application when creating new notes in specific folders. The article explains how to set up Templater by designating a template folder and demonstrates its use with a "news idea" document, showcasing commands like `<% tp.file.title %>` for inserting the current file name and `<% tp.file.cursor(1) %>` for setting the initial typing position. The author also touches upon the desire to automate template application based on folder creation, indicating further possibilities with Templater.

It's cumbersome, yes. Reporter Lee Ju-hyeon felt a bit annoyed, but then muttered, 'Wouldn't it be convenient if I could search the content of attached documents that I previously had to open one by one?' and meticulously followed the Omnisearch usage instructions provided by ChatGPT.

— Article textDetailing the effort and eventual success in configuring Omnisearch.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by Hankyoreh in Korean. Translated, summarized, and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

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