Natural Language Dates

Natural Language Dates in Obsidian

Insert timestamps and cross-link your daily notes with the flexibility of natural language. NLDates provides a suite of tools that makes working with dates and times within Obsidian frictionless.

Features

• Date Autosuggest
• Custom nldates Obsidian URI
• Date Picker

If a date is not recognized, the link won't be created.

Date Autosuggest

Expand dates using natural language inline within the editor view.

Typing @today Enter will automatically be expanded to the current date. Press Shift at the same time to keep the input text as an alias (e.g. @today → [[202112-27|today]]).

Configuration

nldates URI Action

It's now possible to use the Obsidian URI to open daily notes using natural language by using the nldates action obsidian://nldates?day=<date here>. Don't forget to encode space characters appropriately.

Commands and Hotkeys

nldates adds a few commands to work with dates in natural language. You can add custom hotkeys for them by going to Settings > Hotkeys and filtering by Natural Language Dates (Note that hotkeys are unset by default starting on v0.4.1).

Natural Language Dates: Date Picker

Opens the date picker menu

Other Commands

Note: You can of course add hotkeys to each of these commands.

Usage

Examples

The parser supports most date/time formats, including:

• Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, Last Friday, etc
• 17 August 2013 - 19 August 2013
• This Friday from 13:00 - 16.00
• 5 days ago
• 2 weeks from now
• Sat Aug 17 2013 18:40:39 GMT+0900 (JST)
• 2014-11-30T08:15:30-05:30

Demo

Note: The parser will replace all the selected text, meaning that in a sentence you should only select the dates to be parsed and not the full sentence.
In the example sentence Do this thing by tomorrow, only the word tomorrow should be selected. Alternatively, keep in mind that you can place your cursor on or next to the word tomorrow, and it will be replaced:

How to install

In Obsidian go to Settings > Third-party plugins > Community Plugins > Browse and search for Natural Language Dates.

Manual installation

Unzip the latest release into your <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/ folder.

About

Powered by the chrono library and some custom parsing.

Custom Parsing

The only behaviours I changed were the following:

For Developers

NLDates provides an interface for you to parse natural language dates in your plugin. The parsedDate() function is available on the NaturalLanguageDates plugin instance. It has the following signature:

interface NLDResult {
  formattedString: string;
  date: Date;
  moment: Moment;
}

function parseDate(date: string): NLDResult;

• The formattedString will return the date formatted according to the settings of nldates and without the square brackets.
• The date object is what is returned by the parseDate method of the custom parser (using the chrono package).
• The moment object is created with the date object.

Example Usage

const nldatesPlugin = obsidianApp.plugins.getPlugin("nldates-obsidian");
const parsedResult = nldatesPlugin.parseDate("next year");
console.log(parsedResult.moment.format("YYYY")); // This should return 2021

Typical String Formats and Tokens

For further information, see: moment.js docs.

Manipulating the moment instance

If you need, you can further manipulate or format the moment object, for example:

const nldatesPlugin = obsidianApp.plugins.getPlugin("nldates-obsidian");
const nextYear = nldatesPlugin.parseDate("next year");

console.log(nextYear.moment.format("YYYY")); // This should return 2021
console.log(nextYear.moment.fromNow()); // "In two months"

const thisEvening = nldatesPlugin.parseDate("today at 21:00");
console.log(thisEvening.moment.add(1, "hour")); // This would change the Moment to 22:00

Note that if you manipulate the parsedResult.moment, the date and formattedString won't be updated. If you don't want to alter the parsedResult.moment, you should clone it. Read more about that on the moment.js docs site.