Obsidian Update 0.16: What's New and How to Use It

Obsidian update v0.16 is now available for Insiders, and it comes with some great new features!

Update: Obsidian has now updated to v1.0 which means the below changes (and more!) are now available to everyone.

Brand New Tabbed Interface

The biggest change is the updated tabbed interface, which makes it easier to work with multiple documents at the same time. Tabs have been requested for a long time, so it’s exciting to see them in action. There’s also a “Tab Stacks” feature that converts tabs to sliding panes, similar to the Sliding Panes plugin. This plugin has been one of the most popular Community Plugins for a long time, so it’s good to see this popular feature built in.

A screenshot of the new Obsidian tabs update.

An animated example of the new Tab Stacks feature in Obsidian. — Images created by the Obsidian Team.

New Document Headers

Document headers are now built-in, which means you don’t need to add a header to your notes anymore. Each note will have a header at the top of the document that corresponds to the name of the note. This feature is optional, but it’s a nice one to have. If you like to have headers in your documents, you don’t need to add them yourself anymore. Nor do you need to use a plugin like the filename header sync plugin.

An example of a new document with an automatically generated header in Obsidian.

Theme Updates for Obsidian

Finally, themes have been reworked in a big way. Themes are much easier to create and maintain now, which means theme updates should happen faster and cause fewer issues in the future. The Obsidian interface has also been updated to look cleaner and more sleek.

We will see some growing pains for a while though. These were “breaking changes”, which means that most themes are now considered “legacy” and they may not work with v0.16 until the developer updates them.

If you’re attached to a particular theme in Obsidian, you might want to wait to update until your theme updates. You can see if your theme has been updated or not within Obsidian itself (your theme will either say “legacy” or not). There are a lot of great themes out there though, so if yours is taking a while to update, don’t be afraid to try something new!

When will this update be available to the public?

Usually it takes about a month for new changes to go from Insiders to the public. This Obsidian update will likely be available to everyone for free by October 2022.

Cosmetic Updates

There are all sorts of smaller updates that the Obsidian team made in v0.16. These include visual polish, new keyboard shortcuts, new configuration options, and more. You can see the full list of updates on the forum.