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Obsidian Make.md
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Posted by Amontillado
May 6, 2023 at 03:31 AM
With particular interest in MadaboutDana’s ever scholarly opinion, I’ve found an interesting Obsidian plugin.
Make.md could be better documented, which might actually establish creds in the Obsidian world. It’s easy to use. The most mysterious thing I found was the sync concept in spaces, and spaces themselves are poorly explained.
A space is sort of a virtual folder. A file can appear in as many spaces as needed. Drag and drop reordering is supported.
Pretty neat stuff!
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 8, 2023 at 08:25 AM
How flattering – I’m blushing!
I do have the MAKE plugin installed, as it happens, but it changed the whole look’n'feel of Obsidian when I first activated it, and as you say, there are a couple of features that are neither well-explained nor particularly intuitive (although I like the concept as a whole). So I’ve switched it off again until I have a spare moment (or several) to evaluate it properly. The same applies to the awesome Dataview, which is also used by a lot of other plugins. I make desperate efforts to keep my plugin quotient as lean and efficient as possible, but haven’t been that successful (33 plugins installed and counting, although about one third aren’t regularly activated!)
In the meantime I’m having lots of fun playing with Webpage HTML Export (essentially a neat way to create a static HTML web page or even website), and have just installed the WordPress export plugin too.
Amontillado wrote:
With particular interest in MadaboutDana’s ever scholarly opinion, I’ve
>found an interesting Obsidian plugin.
>
>Make.md could be better documented, which might actually establish creds
>in the Obsidian world. It’s easy to use. The most mysterious thing I
>found was the sync concept in spaces, and spaces themselves are poorly
>explained.
>
>A space is sort of a virtual folder. A file can appear in as many spaces
>as needed. Drag and drop reordering is supported.
>
>Pretty neat stuff!
Posted by Amontillado
May 8, 2023 at 12:46 PM
I don’t want to sound overly contrarian, but here’s a guess.
Probably many of the Obsidian plugin community are working professionals or are otherwise tied into the ADO/Agile philosophy.
One of the cornerstones in Agile’s manifesto is working code is worth more than good documentation. I’ve worked on many large projects. Some were more successful than others. The single consistent point between the ones that really shone and the also-rans was documentation.
If you write draft documentation before writing a single line of code, my experience suggests development will be quicker with less backtracking and refactoring, and with fewer bugs.
Obsidian has bugs and glitches that have nothing to do with coding. In some cases, the documentation is where the bugs run free.
For example, there is common Dataview example to list all files in the vault (using straight quotes instead of backticks to avoid confusing any forum formatting going on):
‘’‘dataview
LIST
‘’‘’
That won’t work. This will:
‘’‘dataview
LIST
‘’‘
If the difference doesn’t leap off the page, the difference is “LIST ” in the working version versus “LIST” (no trailing space) in the version that doesn’t work. I can’t find that in Dataview documentation, and I suspect other things I’ve had trouble with amount to similar details.
I appreciate all the volunteer work going into Obsidian. It’s awesome. Please don’t read me as overly grumpy. There are, however, real mysteries to solve with some of the plugins that could be resolved in the documentation.
Posted by Christoph
May 8, 2023 at 02:31 PM
Make.md is nice, but the spaces add yet another level of complexity. And I think with the new (builtin) bookmark plugin you can do pretty much the same as with spaces.
Posted by Amontillado
May 9, 2023 at 02:23 PM
Great tip!
Since my first post I’ve had a case where spaces got confused. The reload spaces feature cured the confusion at the cost of losing all spaces. It didn’t lose any files, but my spaces and their contents were gone.
I haven’t had issues with Obsidian or its core plugins.
You are right, particularly for me. Make.md’s spaces are completely replaceable with bookmarks.
Christoph wrote:
Make.md is nice, but the spaces add yet another level of complexity. And
>I think with the new (builtin) bookmark plugin you can do pretty much
>the same as with spaces.