Background
I wanted to create a variable/placeholder that would take the current month, and output last month in the format “Month Year”. I reached out on Discord, and received some helpful suggestions. Unfortunately they didn’t help me achieve what I was aiming for.
The solution
This morning one of my colleagues gave me a simple command that works well on macOS. I didn’t realise that macOS’ base is BSD, so GNU commands like date --date='-30 days' won’t work for me.
The initial solution my colleague shared was this: date -v-30d. This produces the following based on today being Mon Feb 15 09:28:58 IST 2021:
Sat Jan 16 09:28:37 IST 2021
I took a look at the man pages for the date command, and adapted one of the examples to give me what I need:
date -v-30d -j -f "%a %b %d %T %Z %Y" "`date`" "+%B %Y"
My colleague shared a more refined version that produces the same output:
date -v-30d +'%B %Y'
The output for this command is January 2021 - pretty much what I needed.
Minor challenge
I’d like to be able to add this to a general template, with the command being inserted using Templater. Unfortunately, it looks like the Templater template doesn’t render when I apply the note template containing it to a new, blank note.
Instead, I have to add the note template directly from Templater for it to render correctly for me. It works, it’s just a bit slow.