Daily Notes and Templates

A template is an ordinary note marked template: true in its frontmatter, ready to be stamped into new notes. Daily notes build on that: ⌘J opens today's note, creating it from your daily template if you have one.

Create a template

Run "New Template" from the command palette (⇧⌘P). You get a pre-marked note whose body is its own cheatsheet: the marker line, the tokens, and what carries over.

To convert a note you already have, run "Make This Note a Template". "Remove Template Marker" reverses it. Exactly one of the two shows for a given note.

The marker is one frontmatter line (see Frontmatter and Environments):

---
template: true
---

A template is still a normal note. It lives in your workspace, you edit it like anything else, and its H1 is its name in the picker.

Create a note from a template

⌥⌘N opens New Note from Template: the command palette filtered to one entry per marked note, current workspace's templates first, other workspaces' labeled with their name. Pick one and a new note opens in the current workspace.

Three things change on the way in:

• The template: line is stripped, so the new note is not itself a template.
• The {{tokens}} are substituted.
• The H1 is set to the new note's title, so it does not inherit the template's name.

Everything else carries over: frontmatter such as cwd and tags, the body, code blocks, and links. Substitution reaches inside fences, so a prompt block reading Summarize [[{{yesterday}}]] becomes a real link when the note is stamped.

The tokens

Write these anywhere in a template:

Anything else in doubled braces is left as written, so shell syntax and unrelated {{placeholders}} in code blocks survive untouched.

Daily notes

⌘J opens today's note, titled with today's local date, such as 2026-07-19. If it exists, it opens; if not, it is created. Press ⌘J as often as you like.

The date is local wall-clock time, so a note started at 11pm belongs to today, not tomorrow.

By default the daily note lives in the selected workspace. To send every day to one place, set daily.workspace in Settings (⌘,) and ⌘J goes there from anywhere.

Inside that workspace it sits at the top level. Set daily.folder to put every day in a folder instead, like journal or log/2026, and ⌘J files it there from then on.

Both settings only decide where a day's note is created. An existing one is found by its date wherever it already sits, so changing either leaves the notes you already have where they are.

The daily template

Mark one note in the daily workspace with template: daily and every fresh daily note is stamped from it, tokens included. A template with [[{{yesterday}}]] near the top gives every morning a link to the day before.

The daily role is per-workspace. A workspace with no daily template gets a bare dated note. "Edit Daily Template" in the palette opens the right note, or "New Daily Template" if none exists yet.

In the sidebar, templates show a layout glyph in place of the file icon, and the daily template shows a calendar.

From a terminal, ledge today opens the same daily note. See The ledge CLI.