daily-notes.nvim

An nvim plugin to enable creating periodic notes for journals and planning. Inspired by the Obsidian feature of the same name and Journal.nvim.

I use this as part of my personal Zettelkasten.

Installation

Lazy.nvim

-- install from local repo
-- this is just an example; you can just as well use empty opts {}
{
    dir = "~/daily-notes.nvim",
    opts = {
        writing = {
            root = "~/zettelkasten/daily-notes"
        }
    }
}
-- install from github repo
{ "fdavies93/daily-notes.nvim", opts = {} }

Note that this plugin is only tested on my personal Arch Linux for now. It should work on other UNIX systems (i.e. WSL, MacOS, BSD), but this isn't guaranteed. Windows probably won't work due to differences in file and date handling.

Configuration

The most important option is writing.root. This controls where daily-notes.nvim tries to put new notes and open existing notes. This should integrate with existing setups if you set the writing.day and other options to match your current filename formats.

It's also worth setting writing.day.template to your preferred format for that type of note, e.g:

{
    writing = {
        day = {
            template = "# %A, %B %d %Y\n\n## Notes\n\n## Tasks\n\n## Timebox"
        }
    }
}

If your locale is not English you will need to set parsing.week_starts to be a string in your locale's language. This is because locale strings are used internally for parsing to avoid mixing calls to os.time with baked-in strings.

If you prefer weekly notes to daily ones, you can change parsing.default to be this week.

For a full list of config options, see the default config here.

Usage

Setup your configuration so the directories and templates follow your preferred date format.

:DailyNote day +1
:DailyNote next week
:DailyNote tuesday
:FuzzyTime 2025

daily-notes.nvim exports :DailyNote and :FuzzyTime user commands.

:DailyNote creates a new note or opens a note if one already exists.

:FuzzyTime gives time information for the given input and can be used as a way to do a 'dry run' of :DailyNote or to play with the date parser.

Parsed Date Formats

daily-notes.nvim implements a recursive descent parser to resolve dates in English into timestamps and create files.

Dates are parsed in the following order:

1. Timestamps
2. Unambiguous semantic dates (e.g. 'today')
3. Ambiguous semantic dates (e.g. 'this Tuesday')

The different algorithms for resolving ambiguous dates can be selected in the config at parsing.resolve_strategy.

-- PERIOD is ("day" | "week" | "month" | "year") ~ "s"?

-- Unambiguous semantic dates
today
tomorrow
yesterday
YEAR[,] week NUM
-- if year isn't defined, we just use the current year
week NUM[,] [YEAR]
[+/-]NUM PERIOD
PERIOD [+/-]NUM
PERIOD -- the same as 'this PERIOD'
this PERIOD
next PERIOD
(last | previous | prev) PERIOD
in [+/-]NUM PERIOD
[+/-]NUM PERIOD ago

-- Ambiguous semantic dates

-- WEEKDAY is generated from the locale names for the weekdays, e.g. "tuesday"
-- and their 3-letter prefixes e.g. "tue"

-- the meaning of this / next / last is determined by config
WEEKDAY
this WEEKDAY
next WEEKDAY
(last | previous | prev) WEEKDAY
-- these always use the current week +/- weeks
[+/-]NUM WEEKDAY
WEEKDAY [+/-]NUM

-- MONTH is generated from the locale names for the months, e.g. "january"
-- and their 3-letter prefixes e.g. "jan"

-- the meaning of this / next / last is determined by config
MONTH
this MONTH
next MONTH
(last | previous | prev) MONTH
DAY MONTH
MONTH DAY
[+/-]NUM MONTH
MONTH [+/-]NUM

For the details of date parsing see the fuzzy time module.

For all timestamp formats see default config.

Formatting Date Formats

We use the default strftime for rendering dates, but %W (week number) and %w (numerical day of week) are replaced by bespoke logic so that alternate week starts are possible.

Plugins that work well with this

I prefer plugins that do one job, rather than all-in-one tools.

• telescope-file-browser
• zen-mode
• render-markdown