Daily note calendar plugin

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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
• 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:

Variable	Description	Template
{{date:<template>}}	The date of the note. This date is based on the date that you've clicked on in the calendar.	You can use the same date templating rules of date-fns that you use in the name or the folder. Thus {{date:yyyy-MM-dd - eeee}} would turn into 2024-12-31 - Monday.
{{today:<template>}}	The date of today. This date is based on the date and time of creation of the note.	You can use the same date templating rules of date-fns that you use in the name or the folder. Thus {{today:yyyy-MM-dd - eeee, HH:mm}} would turn into 2024-12-31 - Monday, 12:59.
{{title}}	-	This will take the title of the note you had opened before clicking a date in the calendar.

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.

Period	Variable	Template example
Day	+1d or -1d	{{date+1d:yyyy-MM-dd - eeee}}
Week	+1w or -1w	{{date+1w:yyyy-MM-dd - eeee}}
Month	+1m or -1m	{{date+1m:yyyy-MM-dd - eeee}}
Year	+1y or -1y	{{date+1y:yyyy-MM-dd - eeee}}

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.

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.