Journals Aware Rollover Todos

An Obsidian plugin that rolls unfinished todos forward from your previous note into a newly created one — built to work with the Journals plugin.

It is a spiritual successor to Rollover Daily Todos, rewritten so it no longer depends on the core Daily Notes / Periodic Notes settings. Instead of reconstructing a note path from a single static folder + date format (which Journals' nested, date-templated folders break), it finds the previous note using the journal-date frontmatter that Journals writes into every note.

Why this exists

The original Rollover Daily Todos locates daily notes by rebuilding the expected path as <dailyNotesFolder>/<DD-MMM-YYYY>.md and comparing it to the file on disk. Journals stores notes at paths like:

Daily Notes/2026/08-2026/28-Aug-2026.md

The core Daily Notes plugin can only hold one static folder, so that path can never be reconstructed and the comparison always fails — the rollover silently bails out. This plugin sidesteps path reconstruction entirely and keys off frontmatter, which Journals maintains reliably:

---
journal: DailyNote
journal-date: 2026-08-28
---

How it works

1. When a new markdown note is created (or when you run the manual command), the plugin reads the note's journal and journal-date frontmatter.
2. It scans the vault (via Obsidian's metadata cache) for the most recent note with an earlier journal-date in the same journal — that's your "previous" note.
3. It extracts the unfinished todos from that previous note (optionally including nested child lines).
4. It inserts them into the new note beneath the first heading matching a configurable pattern (default: any heading ending in TODOS, e.g. ## FRIDAY TODOS). If no heading matches, it falls back to the bottom of the note (configurable).
5. Optionally deletes the rolled todos from the previous note.

On automatic runs the plugin waits for the Journals template to finish rendering (polling up to a few seconds) before inserting, so it never races the template.

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
Automatic rollover on new note	on	Roll over when Journals creates a note. The manual command is always available too.
Delete todos from the previous note	off	Move instead of copy. Destructive.
Roll over child items	on	Carry indented lines nested under a todo.
Skip empty todos	on	Ignore bare - [ ] items.
Skip todos already in the new note	on	Avoid duplicate inserts.
Target heading pattern	^#{1,6}\s+.*TODOS\s*$	Case-insensitive regex for the insertion heading.
If the heading is not found	Append to bottom	bottom / top / skip.
Done status markers	xX-	Characters inside [ ] that mean done.
Limit to journals	(empty = all)	Comma-separated Journals names to act on.
Show notice after rollover	on	Summary notice per rollover.

Commands

• Roll over todos into the current note — manually roll the previous note's unfinished todos into the currently active note.

Development

npm install
npm run dev     # watch + rebuild main.js
npm run build   # type-check + production bundle

The repo root is also the installed plugin folder inside a test vault (<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/journals-aware-rollover-todos/), so a build updates the running plugin in place — just reload the plugin in Obsidian.

License

MIT