📔 Periodic Journal

One plugin for every recurring note.
There are no fixed granularities — there is a list of note types.

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Replaces the core Daily Notes plugin and Periodic Notes together, and takes over any recurring note a Templater folder rule was creating.

Why it exists

Periodic Notes models the world as five fixed granularities — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly — with one set of settings each.

That model has no room for a second daily note. Split your journal into work and personal and one of them has no automation at all. Keep a mood tracker, a habit log, a gratitude page — each is a daily note by every meaningful definition, and none of them is the daily note.

The result is a familiar mess: two plugins, a Templater folder rule, and at least one thing you still create by hand every morning.

Note	Typically created by	Problem
Daily note	core Daily Notes	A second plugin doing one granularity
Weekly / monthly / quarterly / yearly	Periodic Notes	On demand only, rarely automatic
A second daily note	nothing	By hand, from a template, every day
A tracker with its own folder	a Templater folder rule	Created at the vault root and moved, or created twice

This plugin replaces the fixed granularities with a list of note types. Each type carries its own granularity, path format, template and auto-create flag, so every note is the same kind of object and nothing is privileged. Adding an eighth recurring note is a settings action, not a release.

How a note type works

Each entry in data.json looks like this:

{
  "id": "mood-tracker",
  "name": "Mood tracker",
  "granularity": "day",
  "format": "[Health/Mood]/[Mood — ]YYYY-MM-DD",
  "template": "Templates/Mood.md",
  "enabled": true,
  "autoCreate": true
}

• format is a moment.js pattern describing the whole vault-relative path without the extension, square brackets being literal. This is deliberately the same convention the core Daily Notes plugin and Periodic Notes already use, so every format string you already have carries over verbatim and resolves to the files that already exist. Migrating costs nothing and moves nothing.
• granularity decides which date the note belongs to (moment().startOf(unit)) and what next/previous step through. One of day, week, month, quarter, year.
• autoCreate includes the type in the startup sweep and the date-rollover sweep.

Creation is one step

A recurring note tends to go wrong when creating it and filling in its template are two separate steps in two separate places. Here they're one:

graph LR
    A[Due note missing] --> B[Make parent folders]
    B --> C[Read template]
    C --> D[Substitute tokens<br/>against the note's own date]
    D --> E[vault.create at final path]

    style A stroke:#e0a030
    style E stroke:#30a060

The file is never created anywhere but its final path, and it is never empty at any point. There is nothing to move afterwards.

Template tokens

The vocabulary matches the core Templates plugin, because that is what your templates are already written against — adopting a new syntax would mean rewriting every template in the vault to install one plugin.

Substitution runs against the note's own date, not the wall clock. Creating Monday's note on Tuesday happens every time a machine is asleep at midnight, and every time you backfill; a {{date}} meaning now would stamp the wrong day into the file, invisibly.

Token	Result for a 2026-08-19 note
{{title}}	26819-daily
{{date}}	2026-08-19
{{date:YYMDD}}	26819
{{time}} / {{time:HH:mm}}	wall clock at creation
{{yesterday}}	2026-08-18
{{tomorrow:YYMDD}}	26820
{{date-1w:gggg-[W]ww}}	2026-W33

Offsets accept d, w, M, Q, y. Anything that is not one of these tokens is left untouched — Dataview inline expressions and stray braces pass through unharmed.

Automation

• On startup, after a configurable delay (default 3s, to let a sync service settle before deciding a note is missing).
• On date rollover, checked once a minute, so leaving Obsidian open overnight still produces the next day's notes.
• On demand, via Create all due notes now in the command palette or the settings tab.

All three run the same sweep, which is idempotent: an existing file is never touched, and a create that loses a race to a sync service falls back to the file that won.

Commands

Command	Notes
Open current <type>	One per enabled type
Create all due notes now	The full sweep, manually
Next note of this kind	Steps by the active note's own granularity
Previous note of this kind	As above

Next/previous identify the active note by generating candidate paths around today and comparing, because a moment format string is one-way and cannot be parsed back. The search is bounded (±400 days, ±60 weeks, ±15 months, ±6 quarters, ±3 years) and only ever runs when the command is invoked.

Gotchas

• This plugin must be the only thing creating these notes. If the core Daily Notes plugin, Periodic Notes, or a Templater folder template still covers the same ground, two things write the same file and the result looks like a bug in here. The settings tab detects all three and says so at the top; a notice also fires on startup.
• Templater is the subtle one. A folder template on a folder this plugin writes into fires on file creation, so it inserts its template a second time — and unsubstituted, since Templater does not process {{date:…}} syntax. The note reads as corrupted rather than as duplicated. If your tracker previously worked, it may only be because the note was created at the vault root and moved, which is not a creation event. Remove the rule.
• A deleted note comes back. The sweep only asks whether the current note exists, so deleting today's note and restarting Obsidian recreates it. That is what automatic means, but it surprises once. Turn off Create automatically for a type you want to opt into by hand.
• A missing template creates an empty note and says so, rather than refusing. Losing today's note because a template moved is the worse failure; an empty note is visible and one paste away from correct.
• A new note type ships disabled. It appears in the list with Enabled off, because a type that started writing into a folder you had not chosen yet would be the wrong first impression.
• autoCreate is not inherited on upgrade. A type written by an older version gets autoCreate: false when a field is missing, even where a shipped default says otherwise — picking up a new writing behaviour silently is not something to do to somebody's vault.

Install

git clone https://github.com/kingletas/obsidian-periodic-journal && cd obsidian-periodic-journal && npm ci && npm run build

cp main.js manifest.json styles.css "$YOUR_VAULT/.obsidian/plugins/periodic-journal/"

Then enable it in Settings → Community plugins. Do the enabling through Obsidian's own UI rather than by editing community-plugins.json: the running app rewrites that file from memory when it exits.

First run

1. Turn off whatever was doing this before. The settings tab detects the core Daily Notes plugin, Periodic Notes and a clashing Templater folder rule, and names each at the top. Two things writing one file looks exactly like a bug in here.
2. Point the default types at your own folders, and set their templates. The shipped defaults are generic on purpose — a folder name shipped to every install is a tree somebody did not ask for, and this plugin writes.
3. Add the types the old model had no room for. A second daily note, a tracker, a habit log. That is the whole reason this exists.

Development

npm ci
npm run dev      # esbuild watch
npm test         # bundle, type-check, and run 51 assertions across five suites
npm run build    # tsc -noEmit, then a production bundle

The suite require()s an esbuild bundle rather than the TypeScript sources, because the bundle is the only thing Obsidian ever loads. moment is deliberately not stubbed as a working clock: the plugin gets its moment from Obsidian at runtime, so a test pulling its own copy in would be testing a different library than the one that ships. Anything needing a date takes an injected one instead.

CONTRIBUTING.md covers the rest. docs/architecture.md explains how the pieces fit together. SECURITY.md covers vulnerability reports — read it before enabling auto-create, because this plugin writes files on a schedule.

License

MIT © Luis Tineo