Obsidian 1.0

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 19, 2022 at 11:53 PM

Obsidian is now amazing, and with certain plugins matches almost anything else in the field. But I’ve been finding the lack of block management frustrating. To explain: In e.g. Craft, Ulysses, Dynalist, Workflowy and many other editors, you can drag and drop blocks of text around – in certain apps you can even embed them. And it’s easy; handling blocks of text (sentences, paragraphs, list items etc.) becomes a very convenient way of building rapid lists or editing complex trains of thought. The fact that Obsidian doesn’t allow you to do that was beginning to get me down…

... But of course someone has developed a block manager that enables Obsidian to do exactly the same thing: Drag’n'Drop for Blocks. It adds a very faint dotted oblong alongside each block of text, and by selecting it you can drag and drop the block under or over another block, or by using a modifier key, embed it in another document (in which case the plugin will automatically append a link ID to the block – in Obsidian, this takes the form of a random block of letters/numbers preceded by a ^ symbol, but you can manually assign your own link IDs to blocks as well).

While testing it, I experienced the occasional glitch (easily resolved by disabling and then reenabling the plugin) – now that I’m used to it, it behaves very well. The embedding works particularly well if you use the “Stacked Tabs” function.

I can recommend it to all those who’ve had enough of copying and pasting large chunks of Obsidian text!

Cheers,
Bill