I am just starting to learn Obsidian and testing if it is an alternative to Evernote. I have learned to import notes and I did manage to change the import template to display the creation and modification date.
But now I am stuck with displaying the same properties in newly created notes.
I have added property fields to new notes, such as date, time, tags. but they are all empty. I don’t want to TYPE the creation date for every note!!! I want to just be able to SEE when a note was created and/or modified. I think this is vital information for a note taking app. It makes a huge difference whether I added the note yesterday or 5 years ago. I can’t believe I am the only one who needs this information.
Please help!
A note’s front matter values are information that you manage, as they are just text in the markdown file.
Some ways to display the files’ creation and modified dates:
- Make a base, click its
Properties, and selectcreated timeandmodified time. - Use a querying plugin (such as Dataview) to dynamically display the dates in your note content. Optionally combine with another plugin that writes the query result to a property.
- Make it part of your template to, upon note creation, insert the created time as a property value. (The Templates core plugin can handle this as can the Templater community plugin.) This alone doesn’t handle modified times.
- Use a plugin to write the modified time to the note’s properties when you modify it (or close it after modifying it, or whatever your threshold). (Linter is one such plugin.)
One reason you might want to use the latter two over the former two options:
Created and modified times are recorded by your operating system and can unexpectedly change with operations such as syncing or moving. Bases and other querying plugins read those dates and return them to you. Managing the data yourself avoids unexpected changes.
thank you!
I also found the plugin Front Matter Timestamps.
Still testing it, but looks good so far.