Better Calendar

A space-efficient calendar and diary hub for Obsidian: a compact calendar on top, writing statistics, a GitHub-style yearly heatmap, a timeline of today's timestamped entries, and a sticky quick-input box that appends to today's diary note — under the right heading for the current time of day.

The layout is stable by design: the calendar renders at a fixed width and height, so dragging the sidebar never changes its cells. The stats, heatmap, timeline and input adapt to the pane width, and in a wide enough pane the statistics move into a second column beside the calendar.

Features

• Daily-note dots. Reads your core Daily notes settings (folder, date format, template) and shows a gray dot on every day that already has a note.
• Click to open or create. Click a day to open its note. If none exists yet, you're asked whether to create one — the new note is placed in your daily-notes folder and filled in from your template ({{title}}, {{date}}, {{date:FORMAT}}, {{time}}, …). The confirmation can be turned off.
• Stable strip layout. The calendar is a fixed-width, fixed-height strip of continuous weeks (one week per row); its width and height are settings, not a function of how the pane happens to be sized.
• Smart "today" placement. By default today's week starts the 3rd row, with two rows of recent weeks above it, so you land on today with its recent history already in view. The ‹ › buttons move the view by one month; Today snaps back.
• Month cues without clutter. Thin gray divider lines separate the months, and the 1st of each month shows a faint centered watermark of the month's name (the year on Jan 1).
• Custom highlights. Add rules that test each daily note against a regular expression and drop a colored dot on matching days — for example ^## 今日运动 to see at a glance which days you exercised.

Diary panel

Below the calendar, the pane doubles as a diary dashboard (every section can be toggled off in settings):

• Quick input. A sticky input box at the bottom of the pane. Whatever note you're in, type and press Enter — the text is appended to today's diary note as a timestamped entry ([16:38] … by default). Entries land under the heading of the current time segment (e.g. 00:00–04:59 → ## 昨夜凌晨, 12:00–19:29 → ## 下午), are kept in time order, and today's note is created from your template automatically if it doesn't exist yet. The entry format, the heading level, the timestamp pattern and the segments are all configurable.
• Statistics. Words written today, current and longest streak, writing days and words this year, and how many notes today's diary links to / is linked from.
• Yearly heatmap. A GitHub-style activity grid — the darker the cell, the more words that day. Hover a day for the standard page preview of its note (Page preview core plugin), click to open it; ‹ › switches years.
• Timeline. Today's timestamped entries (lines matching the entry pattern), rendered as markdown and grouped by section — the diary note stays the single source of truth; the timeline only reads it.

Requirements

By default Better Calendar follows the core Daily notes plugin (Settings → Core plugins → Daily notes): its New file location, Date format, and Template file location decide where notes are found and created. Alternatively, set a Diary path template in the plugin settings (e.g. Diary/{{YYYY}}年/{{YYYY}}-{{MM}}-{{DD}}.md) and Better Calendar uses that everywhere instead — Daily notes doesn't need to be enabled then.

Usage

• Better Calendar appears as a tab in the right sidebar (the calendar icon in the sidebar's tab strip); you can also open or focus it with the command “Better Calendar: Open calendar.” Drag it anywhere, including the main editor area, where the extra width lets it show several months at once.
• Click a day to open/create its note. Ctrl/Cmd-click opens it in a new tab.
• The command “Better Calendar: Write to today's diary” opens the pane and puts the cursor straight into the quick-input box.
• The day of the note you're currently viewing is ringed; dots under each date show note presence and any matched highlight rules.

Settings

Setting	What it does
Language	UI language: follow Obsidian (default), English, or 中文.
Start week on	First day of the week, or follow the locale default.
Confirm before creating new note	Ask before creating a missing daily note.
Show week number	Add a week-number column to each month block.
Diary path template	{{...}} moment tokens; empty = follow core Daily notes.
Diary template file	Template for auto-created notes; empty = core Daily notes template.
Heading level	Markdown level of the time-segment headings (2 = ## 上午).
Entry line pattern / format	Regex that recognizes a timestamped entry, and the shape of inserted ones.
Blank line between entries / Insert in time order	Formatting of inserted entries.
Time segments	Named windows of the day; entries go under the matching heading.
Panel sections	Toggle statistics / heatmap / timeline / quick input individually.
Word count scope	Count the whole note, or timestamped entries only.
Calendar cell size	Edge length of a day cell; the calendar is exactly 7 cells wide and never resizes with the pane. Stats/heatmap/timeline/input adapt to the pane; when there's room the stats sit beside the calendar.
Calendar height	Height of the calendar strip.
Month divider / Day hover color	Divider defaults to a theme gray, hover to the theme accent; either can be custom.
Override locale	Use a different locale for weekday / month names.
Highlights	Regex (+ flags) + color rules; matching days get a colored dot.

Highlight rules

Each rule is a JavaScript regular expression tested against the full text of the day's note. The g flag is ignored (matching is stateless); m (multiline) and i (case-insensitive) are useful. Examples:

Goal	Pattern	Flags
Mark days with an exercise log	^## 今日运动	m
Mark days that mention a book	#reading\b	i

Installation

This repository contains the plugin source. To build and install it:

npm install
npm run build      # produces main.js

Then copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/better-calendar/ and enable Better Calendar in Settings → Community plugins. (You can also point BRAT at this repo.)

Development

npm install
npm run dev        # esbuild watch → rebuilds main.js on change
npm run typecheck  # tsc --noEmit

The code is split into small modules: pure grid math (layout.ts), core daily-notes access (dailyNotes.ts), the diary engine — path templates, time segments, entry insertion/parsing (diary.ts), word counting + caching (wordCount.ts), streak/link statistics (stats.ts), the heatmap renderer (heatmap.ts), the diary panel — stats, heatmap, timeline, quick input (panel.ts), highlight evaluation + caching (highlights.ts), the view (view.ts), settings (settings.ts / settingsTab.ts), and the plugin entry point (main.ts).

License

MIT