Daynest

A modern calendar, nested entirely in your Daily Notes' Markdown.

Daynest adds Year, Month, Week, and Day calendar views to Obsidian. There's no database, no new file format, and no hidden metadata: every event and task it shows is read from and written back to plain Markdown inside your existing Daily Notes. Delete the plugin at any point and your notes stay exactly as readable as they always were.

Screenshots

Why another calendar plugin?

Daynest offers a simple calendar experience that can be used out of the box. No extensive set up, no metadata, no documentation the size of an encyclopaedia.

Daynest exists because I wanted something narrow: a simple, intuitive calendar experience that reads and writes nothing but the Daily Notes I already keep, in plain Markdown, with no properties, IDs, or plugin-only files anywhere in my vault. No sync service to trust, no separate database to get out of sync with my notes, and no dozen configuration screens to get through before it does anything useful.

Features

• Four views — Year, Month, Week, and Day, navigable with the header's switcher, arrows, or Today button
• Nothing but Markdown — events and tasks are plain - HH:MM - HH:MM Title and - [ ] Title bullets; nothing else is ever added to your notes
• Create, move, and resize by dragging — draw a new event on the timeline, drag an existing one to a new time or day, or drag its edge to resize it
• Tag-based colours — colour rules match on #tags already in your titles, with combination rules (work + meeting) taking priority over single-tag ones
• Daily Notes-aware — reads your existing Daily Notes (or Periodic Notes) folder, filename format, and template, and creates a note automatically the moment you add something to a day that doesn't have one yet
• Linked notes — an event's title can double as a link to another note, with an optional alias so the note and the displayed title don't have to match
• Looks like it belongs — styled with Obsidian's own theme variables, so it follows your light/dark mode and accent colour automatically

The Markdown syntax

Daynest recognises a simple syntax. Everything else in a Daily Note — including other bullets, headings, and paragraphs — is left completely untouched.

What	Syntax	Example
Timed event	- HH:MM - HH:MM Title #Tag	- 09:00 - 10:00 Team meeting #work
All-day event	(same shape, spanning your configured working hours)	- 08:00 - 18:00 Conference #work
All-day task	- [ ] Title	- [ ] Buy milk
Timed task	- [ ] HH:MM Title	- [ ] 15:30 Buy groceries #personal

A completed task uses - [x] instead of - [ ].

• Tags are just ordinary inline #tags anywhere in the title — they double as the input to colour rules (see below).
• Wikilinks work normally: - 13:10 - 15:10 [[Project meeting]] is an event whose title is a link. Cmd/Ctrl-click it in any calendar view to open that note.
• The parser is deliberately strict: - 09:00 Meeting (one time, no range) and - This meeting starts at 09:00 are both ordinary Markdown, not events.
• An event is treated as all-day when its times exactly match your configured working hours. There's no hidden metadata marking this, so changing your working hours later can change how an old all-day event is interpreted.

By default, events and tasks live under ## Events and ## Tasks headings (both configurable, and a "single section" mode is available in Settings if you'd rather not split them). A section runs from its heading to whatever heading comes next, so it's safe to have other headings and content elsewhere in the same note.

Using it

• Ribbon icon or command palette → "Open calendar" opens the calendar in a new tab.
• Year/Month/Week/Day switcher, Today button, and ◀ ▶ arrows in the header. Set Default view to "Last used view" in Settings if you'd rather it reopen wherever you left it than always the same view.
• Click a date (Month/Year) or a day header (Week/Day) to open that day's Daily Note, creating it from your template if it doesn't exist yet.
• Click an event or task to edit it; Cmd/Ctrl-click a linked one to open its note instead (linked items display their clean title, not the [[brackets]]). A ✓ on a task toggles it complete directly.
• The editor has a Task toggle that converts what you're creating between a timed event and a checkbox task (it moves it into your configured task section on save). Typing a title that starts with - [ ] or [x] does the same thing automatically.
• Right-click menu: Create, Edit, Duplicate, Copy, Paste and Delete events from the contextual menu.
• Month view: hover a day for a small + button (quick-add, all-day by default); drag an item onto another day to move it; "+N more" opens that day in Day view.
• Week/Day view: click-and-release on an empty slot creates a default-length event there and opens the editor; drag on an empty slot draws a custom time range; drag an existing event's body to move it, both across time and across days; drag its top/bottom edge to resize it.
• All of the above is also available as Obsidian commands (open the command palette and search "calendar"), so you can assign your own hotkeys via Settings → Hotkeys — "Go to today", "New event", "New task", and "Switch to Year/Month/Week/Day view" are all there.
• Colour rules: Colours come from tags, configured in Settings → Daynest → Colours. A rule matches when an item has all of its listed tags; when several rules match, the one requiring the most tags wins (so a work + meeting rule beats a plain work rule), and ties go to whichever rule is higher in your list. Reorder rules with the ↑/↓ buttons.

Daily Notes integration

Folder, filename format, and template come straight from Obsidian's core Daily Notes plugin (falling back to Periodic Notes if that's what you use instead). Creating an event or task on a date with no note yet creates that note first, from your template, with {{date}}, {{date: FORMAT}}, {{time}}, and {{title}} substituted — then opens it according to your "Open Daily Note in" setting.

Installing it

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.4.0 or later, desktop or mobile.
• Obsidian's core Daily Notes plugin enabled (or the community Periodic Notes plugin as a fallback) — see Daily Notes integration.

Option A — with BRAT

1. Install BRAT (Beta Reviewer's Auto-update Tool) from Obsidian's Community Plugins browser, and enable it.
2. Command palette → BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing, then add Neomoorea/obsidian-daynest.
3. Enable Daynest under Community plugins.

BRAT also keeps it updated automatically as new releases come out.

Option B — manual install

1. Go to the latest release and download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css.
2. Create the folder .obsidian/plugins/daynest/ inside your vault, and place those three files in it.
3. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins, click Reload plugins (or restart Obsidian), then enable Daynest.

Option C — build from source

npm install
npm run build

This produces main.js next to manifest.json and styles.css at the project root — copy those three files into .obsidian/plugins/daynest/ as above. npm run dev runs an incremental watch build if you want to modify the plugin.

License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.