Daily Echoes for Obsidian

An Obsidian plugin that resurfaces your daily notes from previous years in the sidebar, so you can revisit what you were doing on this day, this week, this month, or on this day-of-month across the years.

It is the Obsidian counterpart to the standalone On This Day web app — the same idea, but it reads your Obsidian daily notes instead of ICS calendars.

The repository title includes “for Obsidian” for clarity; inside Obsidian the plugin is listed simply as Daily Echoes.

Why

Other "on this day" plugins tend to match every document in the vault and only offer a single "today" view. This plugin:

• Shows only your daily notes by default (with an optional switch to include other documents).
• Offers four time windows: Day, Week, Month, and Day-of-Month.
• Reads your dates straight from the core Daily notes settings — no extra configuration and no hard-coded date convention.

How it works

The plugin uses your Daily notes (or Periodic Notes) configuration to find daily notes and parse each note's date from its filename. For example, with the Daily notes format YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD and folder Log, a note at Log/2021/2021-07-20.md is understood as 20 July 2021.

Only notes that live under the configured daily-notes folder and parse as a valid date are treated as entries — everything else is ignored.

Modes

Mode	Shows earlier entries that fall on…
Day (default)	the same month and day-of-month as today
Week	within 3 days either side of today's date (a 7-day window)
Month	the same calendar month as today
Day-of-Month	the same day number (e.g. the 20th) of any month

Every entry is labelled with how long ago it was (e.g. 2 years ago).

Usage

• Click the calendar-clock ribbon icon, or run the command "Daily Echoes: Open view", to open the panel in the right sidebar.
• Switch modes from the panel header, or use the per-mode commands.
• Click an entry to open that note (⌘/Ctrl-click opens it in a new tab).

Settings

• Default mode — which window opens by default. Default: Day.
• Include other notes — also include notes that aren't daily notes (dated via a frontmatter date, filename, or file creation time). Default: off.
• Include current year — also show earlier entries from the current year (today's own note is always excluded). Default: off.
• Preview — how much of each note to show: none, a truncated snippet, or the full note.

Privacy

Everything happens locally: the plugin makes no network requests and collects no telemetry. It reads only your daily notes, using the paths the core Daily notes settings already define. It looks at every markdown file in the vault only when Include other notes is turned on, because that setting is what asks it to date notes outside the daily-notes folder.

Installation

From the community plugins browser

Once published: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → "Daily Echoes".

Manual

1. Build the plugin (npm ci && npm run build) or download a release.
2. Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/daily-echoes/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

npm install
npm run dev     # watch build
npm run build   # type-check + production build
npm run lint    # oxlint
npm run format  # oxfmt
npm run test    # vitest (test:watch for watch mode)
npm run check   # lint + format check + build + test
npm run deploy  # build, then install into a local vault for testing

Linting and formatting use the oxc toolchain (oxlint + oxfmt).

npm run deploy copies the built plugin straight into a vault. Create a gitignored .env in the repo root pointing at your vault's plugins folder:

OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PLUGINS="/path/to/YourVault/.obsidian/plugins"

The destination subfolder is taken from manifest.json's id. Use ./scripts/install-to-vault.sh --dry-run to preview without writing.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later.