It would be great if there was an option for Obsidian to automatically create new future daily notes when you hit the “open next daily note” hotkey and there is no next note.
Currently, when you do this you get a toast like this:
I often have occasion to add TODOs or notes a few days out and this feature would reduce the friction I currently face in doing so (manually creating new notes, naming the file to match the daily note format, and copy/pasting my daily note template).
If those commands created empty notes, then it would make navigating between sparse daily notes harder.
Perhaps an alternate command should exist. Such as Create previous daily note and Create next daily note
Some other ideas would be an integrated create command that brings up a date-picker that would then format according to your Daily Notes plugin settings.
There is already some other discussion about plugin ideas to add a calendar widget to Obsidian. Example: Calendar view for daily notes
In the meantime, there have been some hacks to mimic calendar functionality, which you might find useful: Calendar and tasks for daily notes
Thank you for the context, @rigmarole. I agree that the right thing to do is to consider a more holistic rethink of how Obsidian lets users navigate daily notes, rather than taking this feature request at face value.
By comparison, in Roam Research, it’s easy to create notes for future dates that get seamlessly integrated into the flow of daily notes.
Currently, when I select the option to “open next daily note” it doesn’t work if no such file is created. I propose it should be created when that happens.
Why?
Sometimes I have a task in my daily note. Now if I can’t do it today, I will like to move it to tomorrow. But I am unable to create the next day’s daily note easily.
Proposed solution
Create the next daily note if it doesn’t exist, and open it.
There is no risk of creating unintended empty notes when dialogue is displayed, allowing to cancel the operation.
Proposed dialogue structure:
There is no daily- //
note after this one. //
Create new one? //
[| ] // ← option: start typing with autocomplete to specify date e.g. in natural language
2020-12-24 (Thursday) // ← Display processed daily note filename corresponding to input from above or from below on hover
[↑tomorrow] [↑Monday] // ← option: Click one of chronologically ordered shortcuts to fill the input field above.
//
[<] [Dec 2020] [>] // ←↓ option: select from date picker to fill the input field above.
29 30 [ 1] [ 2] ... //
<date picker here> //
... [30] [31] 1 2 //
//
[Create] [Cancel] // ← Click on "Create" or press "Enter" to create and open specified daily note. (Just open when already exists.)
The “Create new one?” dialog would be perfectly fine solution in my use case, however it would still conflict with the alternate workflow raised by @rigmarole’s, where a user doesn’t want to create missing consecutive notes but instead quickly skip to the next available valid note.
Would a toggle in the plugin to control whether new notes should be created if they are missing be acceptable?
Maybe this could be interesting: REAL Daily Notes previous/next navigation. It could surely also be modified to handle creation/showing of non-existant Daily Notes.
I’m still pretty new to Obsidian and my Daily Notes routine is not settled yet, but here is what I’m doing right now:
I have a hierarchical format for storing my daily notes: yyyy/mm/dd (still thinking of adding another layer for the week between month and day). That can be easily set in the configuration of the Daily Notes plugin.
For linking to previous/following notes I use Templater and added the following part in my daily note template: [[Daily Notes/<% moment(tp.file.title, "DD-MM-YYYY").subtract(1, "days").format("YYYY/MM/DD") %>|Prev]]<< >>[[Daily Notes/<% moment(tp.file.title, "DD-MM-YYYY").add(1, "days").format("YYYY/MM/DD") %>|Next]]
Now, if the corresponding note does not exist yet, the link will open an empty note titled ‘dd’ at the correct location. If that happens, I invoke Templater -> Open Insert Template Modal, either via CMP-P or directly via hotkey ALT-e and select the daily note template.
One problem with the daily note core plugin .
I can easily jump to today’s daily note from anywhere of obsidian. But to go one day backward in my calendar from where I’m right now is a really needed feature .
Solution
Example: I’m on the august 29 .I press a hotkey i go back in my daily note to august 28 .Press the hotkey again jumps to august 27. I press another hotkey to go to august 28 then to august 29.
Related feature requests (optional)
Some people use templater to paste the previous day and next day as a link. But it creates a lot of unnecessary links. That doesn’t suit Obsidian.
There are shortcuts to go to previous and next daily notes. Or did you really mean you want to go back one calendar day even if there’s no daily note there?