Moments — a timeline that brings your vault together

For a long time, daily notes were the backbone of my vault. Meeting notes, project updates, random thoughts — everything went into the daily note, to be organized later. It worked at first, but over time I found I was loosing more than I was finding and getting annoyed with all the meta work.

I know the answer is supposed to be linking and backlinks — build a zettelkasten, connect your ideas, and everything becomes findable. But honestly, I’m not interested in all that meta work. I don’t want to spend time tagging, linking, and reviewing notes just to make sure I can find them again. I want to write things down where it’s most useful and move on.

Moments is my answer to that. Instead of putting everything in one daily note, you keep notes where they naturally belong — meeting notes in the project file, events in their own documents, research updates with the research — and Moments weaves them into a unified
timeline. You get the chronological view of a daily note without the junk drawer.

How it works

Moments recognizes three types of date-connected content:

  • Inline moments — A dated heading inside any note. For example, in a project file you might have a ## Notes section where you add entries like ### [[2026-02-10]] Contractor walkthrough. The heading’s date links it to the timeline, but the content stays in the project file where it belongs. Over time you build up a log of updates in each file, and Moments pulls them all together chronologically across
    your vault.
  • Standalone moments — Dedicated dated files like 2026-02-10 - Coffee with Sarah.md
  • Implicit moments — Files created or modified on a given day appear as subtle context entries

Open the timeline and you see everything from a given day in one place — project updates, meeting notes, your daily log, and whatever else you were working on.

Other features

  • Auto-filters when you open a daily, weekly, or monthly note
  • Works with Daily Notes and Periodic Notes plugin date formats
  • Commands for quickly creating inline or standalone moments
  • Configurable date format, heading level, insert position, and more
  • Works on mobile

Installation

Moments is pending approval in the community plugin directory. In the meantime, you can install it with BRAT:

  1. Install BRAT from Settings → Community plugins → Browse
  2. Open Settings → BRAT → Add Beta plugin
  3. Enter mattmcmanus/obsidian-moments

I’d love to hear feedback — this is my first Obsidian plugin and I’m actively developing it.

3 Likes

This looks promising as I am keeping logs across different projects. But I have this query in my daily note:
“[[2026-03-17]]”
-path:“Daily log”

What can your plugin do that this query can’t?

Totally valid question! What I’ve found is that I much prefer to not have to click around into a lot of different daily notes to see that timeline. Having a persistent panel that reacts to what I’m looking at is pretty useful. I made a quick little video demonstrating how it it’s currently working: CleanShot 2026-03-19 at 11.39.13 · CleanShot Cloud

1 Like

Thanks. I’ll give it a try. I currently have about 10 log notes which aim to help catch up on projects when I return to them. It’s getting quite scattered.