Improve date and time management

Feature archive
1

Hello. I’ve been using Obsidian for a little time now and I’m blown away by its awesomeness. Unfortunately, there’s a critical feature missing, which to me is vital and without it, I’m lost (I think it’s quite the same for many others, students in particular):


Date and time management

As of right now (version 0.9.11), there’s no way to visualize, edit or search by date of creation and date of modification, it’s just possible to sort posts.
I use Obsidian to take notes for my lectures at university, and it’s important to me that knowledge and notes are searchable and linked not by topic only, but by date too. If I miss the last few minutes of a lecture, or if I don’t remember the topic of a class but I recall the date it took place, with date management I can easily get back to the right file.

What’s needed

There are some features related to date and time management which I consider essential in an all-in-one markdown editing environment.

  • An editable metadata panel (perhaps it could be placed below the back-links section), containing the most important infos, specifically:
    • note creation date and time
    • when the note was last edited
    • tags
  • Integrate date management with YAML front matter: if one has a Jekyll website, it’s very important to both create and preserve that metadata.
  • Automatically update the date when editing the note
  • being able to change the last edited date (for example you fixed a typo in your note but the actual last edit of the content of the note was months ago)

Inspiration / examples

Please drop below screenshots of metadata windows from other programs, I’ll add them below.

Workarounds

Up to now, the only way I could manipulate dates is by writing them each time in plain text at the beginning of my note (always in the same format) and search for it later.

I tried to set something up by using templates and the daily notes plugin, but I cant’t understand (as it’s pointed out in several other forum posts) whether Obsidian interprets that metadata or if it just leaves it as is.


Related posts



I’d really appreciate to know what you think and if you liked this topic.
I think it’s important to make it visible to many people and discuss about it.

Thanks a lot!
Tommi

28 Likes
2

Hello,

I wanted to maintain the frontmatter and I wrote some (limiter) functionality in a plugin

you can find it in Obsidian, it’s called Markdown Prettifier

it allows you to set up a template.
Later, It modifies the date each time you ‘prettify’ your note.

image
image1899×1083 145 KB

2 Likes
3

Thanks a lot! Your plugin doesn’t solve all the problems for good, but it makes for sure the cumbersome work less messy. Thanks again. Cheers!

4

fully agree and already discussed in many threads.
let’s hope that final API 1.0 will have a standard date / updated metadata

we already have tags, alias and css… and nice metadata box… so the door is open :slight_smile:

1 Like
6

Related feature requests:

2 Likes
7

+1 Any further info about the ability to see and edit metadata, especially the date?

2 Likes
8

Creation and modification date are a very logical and essential part of YAML front matter. Please add this feature.

7 Likes
9

+1 I’m gonna bump this one, too.

10

Created date you can do by simply adding it into the YAML of your default note template.

An example for Templater:

---
created: <% moment().format() %>
---

Modified date you can use a plugin to keep this updated. I wrote a plugin which does this, and there are other options also:

1 Like
12

The new properties adds specific data types for date and date & time. This partially covers this FR.

I am gonna mark this as closed and kindly ask you to search/open specific FRs for what is missing (like the one below)

1 Like