Plugin to automatically timestamp all lines in vault

Plugins ideas
1

I’ve been using Obsidian for years and the second brain it’s offered me has changed my life!

I often use the natural language date plugin to insert timestamp links to daily note files and mark all the important stuff I do with specific dates…but one thing I’ve always wished Obsidian had is an automatic timestamp for all lines (created at and modified at times.) If this information was present for each line, I could see exactly when I entered certain lines in a note file even if I didn’t specifically add a date.

This would be very useful to remember when things happened (e.g. a todo list where I have an automatic date of when ever todo item was added) or to help me to organize and retrospect on different events that happened (e.g. I took a note that this person was VP of engineering on April 5’th, 2021, and then another note that they got promoted to CTO on Feb 2023)

I also think some obsidian queries could be made extremely powerful (e.g. show all the lines I typed from april 4’th 2021 to may 10’th 2021 that contain the tag #follow-up)

I haven’t been able to find a plugin that automatically adds time/date stamps to each line… a bonus would be that these timestampts are only made visible when requested or specifically triggered, and can be queried with normal obsidian queries.

Does anyone know if a plugin or some core functionality exists that can easily do this without me having to hit a hotkey every line that I type? Any advice would be much appreciated - if it doesn’t exist I think a plugin like this could add a lot of userful metadata to anyones vault.

3 Likes
2

You can achieve this part very easily with the Tasks plugin, which has an option to add the created date to all newly added tasks:

In regards to adding a timestamp to every line (I really can’t imagine this :P) - you could use Templater to make a template with the timestamp, and assign the template to Alt+Enter or Ctrl+Enter or Shift+Enter.

Yes it’s a hotkey, but it won’t take long for your muscle-memory to pick up the new sequence of ending a line with one of those combos.

Template would be something like:

 <% moment().format() %>

If you really don’t want to use a hotkey, you could either write a plugin, or use AutoHotKey to remap the Enter key to inserting similar text to above.

1 Like
3

Not sure if this could be what you are looking for, but if you use Git to back up your notes (and you really should!), the Obsidian-Git has a feature where you can view the git-blame information, effectively telling you the timestamp when each given line was committed. With a short enough auto-commit interval, this effectively becomes the timestamp of when the line was last edited.

1 Like
4

I’m also looking for this feature.

5

I would love this.