In a Nutshell
Useful / Download
Obsidian is great. Plugins are awesome. But there are more things to make Obsidian even better for you. Here are two of them.
Install the Templater plugin
You need Obsidian (duh!) which you can download for free, and the equally free community plugin called “Templater”.
To install and enable the plugin, follow these steps:
- Go to Obsidian Settings by pressing the cog in the bottom left-hand corner
- Click on Community Plugins and Browse.
Click for larger image
- Search for “Templater”
- Click install
- Enable the plugin.
Click for larger image
- Back in Settings, go to Templater, and enter the path to your templates. This could be the root directory, but I recommend having a dedicated folder for your templates. If this folder does not exist, you have to create it first.
Click for larger image
Make your Obsidian template smart
This comes from GitHub user SilentVoid13. It is a templater script, that makes it really fast and easy to add callouts.
Setup
The template
For this to work, you need to create a new template in your designated templates folder. For example, Template – Callouts. Then copy/paste the templater code into it.
The hotkey
Now, you need to define a hotkey for this template. As always, go to the Obsidian Settings, Templater, and Add new hotkey for template. Select the Callouts template and click on the plus icon next to it.
In the hotkey settings, search for callouts, click the plus symbol, and pick any shortcut you like that does not interfere with existing settings. For this demo, I will choose CTRL + SHIFT + C.
The result
- Create a new note and press
CTRL + SHIFT + C(or whatever hotkey you defined), and the script asks you several things: - callout type
- folding state
- title
- content (can have multiple lines, but note that you need to hit
SHIFT + Enterto create one).
Then, hit Enter or click the Submit button, and your callout is ready.
What I like most about this is that it’s super fast and gives me a list of callout types to choose from. Combined with the Callout Manager plugin, this gives me full flexibility and makes the use of callouts very efficient.
You can copy the script from here. When pasting the code, make sure to “Paste as Plain Text” — otherwise, Templater will run into a parsing error.
Temporarily Hide Properties
I found this one on Reddit, posted by user [CharmingThunderstorm](https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/167hylo/how_to_partially_hide_properties). It is a CSS snippet that hides the “Properties” in the reading view, shows them when hovering, and keeps them open if you click into any of them for editing. Let me show you how that works.
Setup
Go to Settings, Appearance, and scroll all the way down to the CSS snippets section.
Click on the folder icon. This should open the local folder containing the snippets. Create a new file and give it a name that makes sense to you. For example, hide-properties.css. Make sure that the file extension is css. If you don’t see your file extensions, click on View, Show, and File name extensions (in Windows Explorer).
Now open the file and copy the CSS code below into it. Save the file, return to Obsidian, and refresh the list of snippets. Enable the hide-properties one, and that should do it. If it does not, you may have to restart Obsidian.
Result
Using this snippet, the properties will automatically be collapsed/hidden. When you hover, they expand, and — if you don’t click into one of them — they will automatically collapse when you move the mouse away. If you edit a property, they stay open, of course.
You can copy the snippet from here.
More in This Series
- Episode I — Templater callout script, auto-hide properties
- Episode II — Active tab color, hotkey sync, hide specific properties
- Episode III — Styled TOC, find missing/empty notes, Plugin Groups
- Episode IV — Bad YAML finder, stacked tabs, dropdown fields, bullet threading
- Episode V — Columns, floating callouts, table styles, tasks dashboard, help tooltip