Developing Obsidian Plugins: The Key to Personalizing Your PKM System

NebraskaJS 2024 edition! Welcome to a new year and a new lineup of talks! We're kicking it off strong with a talk from John Christopher on Obsidian plugins! They're written in JS/TS and are an extremely powerful way to customize your second brain. We'll meet for 30 minutes of socializing, starting at 5:30PM, with the talk starting at 6:00PM.

Interested in speaking at an upcoming NebraskaJS meetup? Let Nick Nisi know!

Talk Summary

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge management and note-taking tool that uses a unique linked-note system, enabling users to create, manage, and visualize connections between their notes.

In this talk, I will discuss how to build Obsidian plugins to personalize your Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. By the end, I will have walked through creating a custom Obsidian plugin that uses an AI API to summarize book highlights stored in Obsidian.

To start, we will review the basic structure of an Obsidian plugin and how to get a Typescript development environment setup using an Obsidian plugin template repository on GitHub.

We will review how to set up some basic UI commands and add them to context menus within Obsidian using Obsidian's Typescript API. We will learn how to parse the markdown content of a note and then update specific sections of a note with new content.

The last step will be combining what we learned with the Obsidian's `requestUrl` API to interact with an AI API.