I’d like to name my daily notes in format <date format> <title>, like “2025-08-23 summary of what I did today”, so that when I view the daily notes in the list, I know what each note is about by looking at the title, and recall what I did in a time period.
I expect that when I press the “Open today’s daily note” button, if there exists a note whose name starts with current date, it is opened, instead of opening a new note.
Proposed solution
Add an option to the Daily notes plugin, like “Allow filename with date prefix” as a checkbox, when checked, the “Open today’s daily note” command tries to find the daily note by date prefix, if there’s none, open a new file.
The naming that you propose for your daily note “2025-08-23 summary of what I did today” sounds like a MOC. A daily MOC.
Maybe there is something in the MOC way of note taking that could work for you?
I personally use a standard daily note as a summary for the things I did today. To see everything that I touched today, I have a Base sidebar that shows all files created / modified today.
Just suggesting some different approaches to reach, what I hope is a similar outcome.
I believe the Periodic Notes plugin was working on a feature like this. I don’t know if it ever made it to the beta version or if it was only ever a plan. (It used to have documentation about the beta in its README, which should still be viewable in that file’s version history.) The public release hasn’t updated in 3 years; I don’t know how up to date the beta is.
Not a solution but an alternative.
I wanted a similar thing but gave up on the idea a couple of years ago because as far as I could tell it could not be done.
Instead, I added a new (automatic) field to my frontmatter’s template called titledate.
Why?
Some notes I name with the date, especially receipts, and some I don’t. Either way, my “titledate” field always includes the date, and my “title” field never includes the date, no matter how I named my file.
When I want to see all my files by date, I go to my “Timeline” file that is a dataview file (but that I am currently trying to re-create as a base file):
I like that I always have a full timeline/chronology when I need it, but can still see files like “Chest Freezer Manual” without an unecessary date before it.
