hello everyone welcome back to the Keep productive youtube channel today i will be passing over to
curtis mchale who is going to be diving into obsidian updates that have been released in
december 2020. it's exciting to see obsidian grow especially as it reaches towards being out of beta
still some time to go however make sure to check out the obsidian made simple course which you will
find in the link in the description this is a full course in order to learn obsidian from scratch all
the way to intermediate and some advanced lessons in there too big thank you to curtis for coming on
the channel please do make sure to check out his youtube channel as well in the link in description
on with the show welcome today we're gonna go over the updates for obsidian for december 2020. this
covers versions uh zero nine one six to zero 10.1 first thing i want to look at is sync so obsidian
now has end to end sync that you can pay for if you want it's gonna be selective and it has
version history if you want and the easiest way to find the details is to go into your settings
turn on sync here check sync and then you can see it tells me i have to purchase it
so we can go to all the ways that you can support obsidian you can see sync is four
dollars a month it has the end-to-end encryption built-in version history
priority email support that's it for sync next up we have some stuff with front matter one of the
first things we can do is an alias in our front matter so front matter is defined by these three
dashes right three dashes so everything inside here is front matter
and the aliases are in this case ai and artificial intelligence that means that if i search i can
search ai you can see it right here is obsidian test bed link to that file right obsidian
you see i have the file there or i can also go artificial intelligence and then i can define
that in there now this takes what's called a yaml format and so that is a programming language that
means we need to put the square bracket to define what's called an array and then our multiple
um aliases here if we wanted to have a fancy character in here uh let's say you want to
need a pound in here we could do pound or a dollar sign maybe something now we'd also have
something in there but we do not need actually it needs to be double quotes really
double quotes instead of single double quotes so now we can have that alias as well it would be
something next thing we can do with front matter is we can also have uh pkm and height so these are
two tags here inside our front matter originally you actually had to have your double quotes
and the pound symbol and then it would be recognized as a tag but they removed that
in one of the versions here as well so it was first introduced and i think it was a 0 916 and
then later on before in this meantime it's been removed so you can just list them both like that
you can also now collapse preview mode or collapse your front mounter there and in preview mode
you can also have it collapsed or shown in preview mode another thing you can do with your front
mounter is if you go uh classes you can actually set up css classes so you could style your thing
or your notes so we do a css class and then we can list our classes right class one and now we would
actually have a css class on our file which would let us to find special styles for this note so
that it could show up differently so for me i have a lot of book notes and i could actually have all
of my main book notes styled separately just to look a little different so i could tell them apart
visually easily now we're gonna do the last two ones that are kind of in the front matter stuff
um together even though one is pdf only really so in export to pdf we have um this will now respect
your show front matter settings which is inside the settings of obsidian and it will also now
pdf allow you to decide what type of printing you want to do whether it's letter you want to do in
landscape how big your margins are and if you want to down scale it or not so you have more settings
for your pdfs and they will respect whether you show front matter or not out of your settings in
obsidian now on the themes front we have a few new things here if we go into our settings let me go
to appearance and themes you can see i don't have any themes here but we can browse community themes
it takes a second to load this and we can now have multiple themes installed and switch back
and forth between them this is actually one that i love i really like this 80s theme so we could
use it and i have dark themes only set let's just grab another one oh let's use this one too
so that's a community theme and now i actually have you can see 80s neon and i can switch live
between them right in the middle of it or in the middle of using obsidian another thing you can
do if you are in to css snippets is you can enable css snippets so we can open the folder we drop our
css snippets in here and we can enable and disable them selectively if you want to dive into that
i generally don't dive into all this extra configuration because this is a tool for me
to get stuff done and mucking with it means i'm not getting stuff done there's also an
update on our third-party plugins so we can go in check for updates there's no updates found
but we can browse and we can actually go through and like individually update one so if i installed
the tables and there was an update specifically for the tables one then i could update that
as well on my own or the calendars is what i'm looking at not advanced tables so i could update
individual plugins without updating some of the other ones if i didn't want to do that
finally maybe some of the biggest changes have been in our file window over here there's just
a lot of stuff we can do now we can now do multi-select so that can be with option where
we select separate files like that or we can do right if i select one and if i hold shift
it'll select all the files between now that is for uh option for mac os and alt for windows another
thing we can do to preview is if we hover over a file and then hold command on mac control on
windows you can see it starts to preview the file so this is a cycling dynamo hub it's a cycling
thing another thing we can do is if we want to go back to my test bed and if i want to search let's
search men here and i can drag it in to create a link to a file now that's new we can do a lot
more just dragging like that from our backlinks panel if we open our backlinks we could drag
and there so there you go let's just pull in this right so i now have a link in here
so it's mentioned ai that's just part of a link and that alias matched up to the ai
alias i had in here as well so we can do a lot more like that dragging from multiple panels to
link things together so you don't have to actually type the whole link in you
can be searching through your backlinks through other spots and then drag them into your notes
so that they show a link another interesting thing you can do is if we open let's open drafts for me
and i can actually grab from file explorer fake drafts and i can drag in
drafts i can drag in my dynamo hub and this is actually a link to go out
to that note in obsidian so i don't have to go searching for it later so this can let you
create dynamic links between applications so that you have your data around for you
another nice thing you can do in the drag and drop is you can i'll go my new road bike and i can drag
it into my start panel up here and it's now there and for a while you've been able to just drag
these panels around so i can drag it in here now start is just in there and i can remove it with a
right click and click remove that's it for the obsidian updates for december covering uh 9.16
to 10.1 a lot of good updates i think my favorites are the aliases and the front matter stuff that's
the stuff that i'm going to use i'm going to modify some of my base note templates to include
aliases to include the front matter so that i can see it later down below you'll find a link
to the obsidian course from keep productive thanks for watching have an awesome day
you