Daily notes calendar

Daily note calendar plugin

The Daily note calendar plugin started as a hobby project because another calendar plugin to open daily notes couldn't handle my own date format for daily notes which is (yyyyMMdd - eeee e.g. 20241231 - Saturday). Therefore, I decided to write my own plugin which allows you to customize the format of your daily and even weekly notes.

Table of contents

• 1. Features
  • 1.1 Periodic notes
  • 1.2 Variables
    • 1.2.1 Calculating dates
  • 1.3 Notes created on a specific day
  • 1.4 Commands
    • 1.4.1 Open periodic notes
      • Open weekly note
      • Open monthly note
      • Open quarterly note
      • Open yearly note
    • 1.4.2 Navigate to the next or previous week
    • 1.4.3 Navigate to the next or previous month
    • 1.4.4 Display the current note in calendar
  • 1.5 Displaying notes created on a specific day
• 2. External dependencies
• 3. Build and test
• 4. Contribute
  • 4.1 Branching strategy
• 5. Create a new release

1. Features

1.1 Periodic notes

Quickly navigate your vault using a calendar view, this plugin allows you to create and navigate to your periodic notes such as

• Daily notes
  • By clicking on a specific date
• Weekly notes
  • By clicking on the week number
• Monthly notes
  • By clicking on the month name
• Quarterly notes
  • By clicking on the quarter name in the upper-left corner
• Yearly notes
  • By clicking on the year number

For each note, you can specify the template of the name yyyy-MM-dd - eeee and the folder where the newly created periodic note should be stored. The path is also customizable using the date formatting rules of date-fns.

Below each date, you can choose to display an indicator whether or note that date already has a note.

1.2 Variables

All the notes that you create must be based on a template, this allows you to create your periodic note based on the same template every time. Inside your template-file you can use the following variables:

1.2.1 Calculating dates

For the {{date:<template>}} and {{today:<template>}} variables, you can add or subtract days, weeks, months and years.

You can subtract or add a period using the + or - sign followed by the period and the amount of that period you want to add or subtract.

Where the number is the amount of the period you want to add or subtract.

The complete template would look like {{date+1y:<template>}} or {{today+1y:<template>}}. to add one year to the date. You can change the amount or the period in the above example to any period from the above table.

1.3 Notes created on a specific day

For each day you select, you can enable the feature to display all the notes created on that specific day below the calendar. This allows you to easily navigate your vault using the calendar view and quickly find the notes you've created on any day.

In the settings, you can specify how you want the plugin to find the notes created on a date. Either use the default created date of the actual file or use a specific property in the front matter of the note.

The created on time displayed below each note can be customized using the date formatting rules of date-fns.

You can always navigate to created notes by pressing the shift key and clicking on the date. This will only list the notes created on that date and not open or create the daily note.

1.4 Commands

To navigate your vault even faster, the Daily Notes Calendar plugin offers a couple of commands to navigate your periodic notes.

1.4.1 Open periodic notes

You can open your weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly note by using the one of the following commands

Open weekly note

Daily notes calendar: Open weekly note

If today is 2024-12-31, the command will open the note 2024-W52 in the folder specified in the settings.

Open monthly note

Daily notes calendar: Open monthly note

If today is 2024-12-31, the command will open the note 2024-12 in the folder specified in the settings.

Open quarterly note

Daily notes calendar: Open quarterly note

If today is 2024-12-31, the command will open the note 2024-Q4 in the folder specified in the settings.

Open yearly note

Daily notes calendar: Open yearly note

If today is 2024-12-31, the command will open the note 2024 in the folder specified in the settings.

1.4.2 Navigate to the next or previous week

You can navigate the calendar to the next or previous week by using the following commands

Daily notes calendar: Navigate to the next week

This will navigate to the next week relative to the current weeks in the calendar.

Daily notes calendar: Navigate to the previous week

This will navigate to the previous week relative to the current weeks in the calendar.

1.4.3 Navigate to the next or previous month

You can navigate the calendar to the next or previous month by using the following commands

Daily notes calendar: Navigate to the next month

This will navigate to the next month relative to the current month in the calendar.

Daily notes calendar: Navigate to the previous month

This will navigate to the previous month relative to the current month in the calendar.

1.4.4 Display the current note in calendar

You can navigate to the current note's date in the calendar using the following command

Daily notes calendar: Display the current note in calendar

This will navigate the calendar to the date of the currently opened note. This will either take the creation date of the note, or the created date property if you've enabled that setting.

1.5 Displaying notes created on a specific day

When you've enabled the feature to display notes created on a specific day, you can also choose to display the current opened note in the calendar. This can be done by using the command Daily notes calendar: Display the current note in calendar. This will highlight the date of the current note in the calendar, and below the calendar all notes that are created on the same date as the currently opened note.

The command will either use the date that the note was created on, or the property specified in the plugin settings.

2. External dependencies

The Daily note calendar plugin uses npm as a package manager, so most dependencies required by the plugin can be installed using the following command:

$ npm install

To locally test your plugin, you need to have Obsidian (which is pretty self-explanatory why). For more information about the process of developing an Obsidian plugin, I'm happy to refer you to the Obsidian documentation.

3. Build and test

To build and test the daily-note-calendar plugin, you can use the following commands:

$ npm install
$ npm run build
$ npm run test

Only the business logic is tested that doesn't depend on anything from Obsidian.

4. Contribute

Is there a feature you'd like to see, or a bug you've encountered? Please let us know, and help us make the Daily note calendar great for everyone! Or, if you're a developer, try to fix it yourself! If you'd like to contribute back to the project, but you're not quite sure yet what you can add, take a look at the roadmap.

All contributions are welcome, so feel free to join the open source community and support Daily note calendar through your expertise!

To make sure everyone can contribute to Daily note calendar we value the quality and understandability of our code and repository. So when you're building a feature, or patching a bug, and you've made a decision, please document that decision in the docs/design.md document. This will help future contributors to understand your rationale. If you've updated some logic in the code, please check the decision records and update the related ones. If you've done all this, update the test-suite and validate that your newly created code does exactly what you'd documented.

4.1 Branching strategy

So now that your idea is implemented, documented and tested, it's time to merge it into the project! To help you out a bit on how to set up a branch, we've got you covered in this chapter!

The Daily notes calendar project does not use a development branch but instead uses short-lived feature branches which are directly merged into the main-branch. We've chosen this strategy 'cause we believe in release often, release fast. There's no need for your feature to gather dust in a stale development branch while waiting on some arbitrary date to be released. But, we do however, have some guidelines:

• If you're contributing a feature use the feature/<your-feature-name> naming convention
• If you're contributing a bug fix use the bugfix/<the-name-of-the-bug> naming convention.
• If you're contributing to documentation use the documentation/<name-of-change> naming convention.
• If you're contributing a hot fix use the hotfix/<hotfix-type>-<name> naming convention
  • These can be useful for updating dependency versions

5. Create a new release

To create a new release of the plugin, edit the package.json file and update the version property. Then run npm run version to update the version in the manifest.json and versions.json file. Once the release is completed, merge the branch back into the main branch.

For versioning Daily note calendar uses semantic versioning. Which, given the documentation on semver.org, means that the version number consists of MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH.

When creating a release of Daily note plugin, check what kind of changes have been applied since the previous version and categorize these in one of the following segments:

1. Incompatible API change, or a user interface change
2. New functionality which doesn't break existing functionality
3. Bug fix

These can be mapped on the semantic versioning scheme in the following ways:

• Update the MAJOR version when you've made a breaking change either in the interfaces or in the UI.
• Update the MINOR version when a new feature is introduced
• Update the PATCH version when a bug is resolved

When you've updated the version in package.json create a new tag in Git using the following structure: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. For version 5 with a bugfix this would be 5.0.1.

This can be created using the following Git-command:

$ git tag -a 5.0.1
$ git push -u origin 5.0.1

This will create the tag locally and then push it to Github which in turn will kick off the required pipelines to create the new release and add the build artifacts.