Skip to the text
tidy notebookDocs GitHub

Writing notes

View as Markdown

Daily notes

This page is for the person who writes the notes. It explains the note of each day and the calendar in the sidebar that opens it.

The note of a day

Each day has one note. By default its name is the date, for example 2026-09-24, and it is in the folder Daily notes. You can change the folder and the name in the settings. It is an ordinary note: you edit, search, link, export and delete it like any other note.

If you rename the note or move it to another folder, it is no longer the note of its day. The next time you open that day, a new note is made.

The calendar

The sidebar has a thin bar at its left edge. Select the calendar button in that bar to show the calendar, and the folder button to show your notes again. The sidebar keeps the view that you chose. The calendar shows one month. A day with a note has a dot under its number, and today has an edge around it.

  • Select a day to open its note. If the day has no note, a new one is made.
  • Select the calendar icon beside the month to open the note of today.
  • Select the arrows to go to the previous or the next month.
  • With the keyboard, the arrow keys move one day or one week, Home and End move to the start and the end of the week, and Page Up and Page Down move one month. Hold Shift with Page Up or Page Down to move one year. Press Enter to open the note of the selected day.

You can also open the command palette and select Open today's note. The date comes from the clock of your device.

Settings

Open Settings and go to Daily notes. The settings apply to the open workspace, and they follow your account to every device.

  • Template is a note whose text a new daily note starts with. The text is copied once, when the daily note is made. A later change to the template does not change the daily notes that already exist. Select No template to start each daily note empty.

  • Open today's note when the app opens opens the note of today each time the app starts on the note list. If you open the app with the address of a note or of another page, that page opens instead.

  • In the template, a placeholder in double braces is filled when the daily note is made. See Placeholders in a template.

  • Folder is the folder that holds the daily notes. Leave it empty to keep them at the top of the workspace.

  • Name format is the name of each daily note, written with date tokens. A new folder or format applies when you leave the field or press Enter. The line under the fields shows the name of today's note as you type.

Date tokens

The name format uses the same tokens as Obsidian.

Token Example for Friday 25 September 2026
YYYY 2026
YY 26
Q 3, the quarter
MMMM September
MMM Sep
MM 09
M 9
DD 25
D 25
Do 25th
dddd Friday
ddd Fri
dd Fr
d 5, where Sunday is 0
  • A / makes a folder. For example, YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD dddd puts the note of today at 2026/09/2026-09-25 Friday in the daily notes folder.
  • Put other text in square brackets, for example [Journal] YYYY-MM-DD. A letter outside brackets can be a token: D in Day writes the day.
  • The format must have a year, a month and a day of the month.
  • The names of months and days are in English on every device.

Placeholders in a template

The template of a daily note fills its placeholders once, when the daily note is made, with the date of that note and the time of now. The placeholders are the same as in every other template. See Placeholders in a template.

If you change the folder or the format, the notes you already have stay where they are. The calendar marks only the notes that have the new name.

If you move the template note to Trash, a new daily note starts empty. When you restore the template, it is the template again.

With no connection

The settings that your device read last stay in use. If the template text is not on your device and there is no connection, the daily note is not made. Connect to the internet and try again.