Navigate sequential daily notes

[arnold-c]

In Obsidian, the Periodic Notes plugin has a set of commands that allows users to traverse their daily/weekly/monthly notes, navigating from the currently open note to the next/previous note of the same type. This is useful if you want to quickly get an overview of your week etc. One of the key features is that it does not creating missing notes and just skips to the next available note.

Does this functionality exist in obsidian-nvim, or can anyone think of a way that this can be done with the current state of the plugin?

[neo451]

makes sense, I will improve the ability to find and sort daily notes first, because current implementation is not idea for more complex use case you mentioned.
I am will track this one here #245

[arnold-c]

Great. Thank you!

[OmegaLambda1998]

It's a little hacky, but I just use template substitution for this.

My daily notes template includes:

[Yesterday]({{yesterday}}.md) --- [Tomorrow]({{tomorrow}}.md)

and my config has

subs.yesterday = function()
    return os.date(obsidian.opts.templates.date_format, os.time() - 86400)
end
subs.tomorrow = function()
    return os.date(obsidian.opts.templates.date_format, os.time() + 86400)
end

(where obsidian.opts.templates.substitutions = subs)

It's certainly more work than a simple keybind since I have to actually navigate to the Yesterday and Tomorrow links, but it get's most of the way there.

[arnold-c]

Thanks. The only thing is I think this requires that all daily notes exist to be able to traverse them? I don't take notes every day, just when I have something I'd like to remember, and I'd like to avoid creating a bunch of empty files whose sole purpose it to facilitate daily note navigation. Apologies if I've misunderstood your substitution (it would be great if I have!).

[OmegaLambda1998]

No, unfortunately you haven't, though there is a similar solution you could do in your case. If you basically just want a sequence of notes you can sequentially navigate, you could instead number your notes (1.md, 2.md, etc...). Since substitution functions take an obsidian.TemplateContext object, you could have something like:

local function get_note_number(note)
    local title = note:get_field("title")
    return tonumber(title)
end
subs.previous = function(ctx)
    local note = ctx.partial_note
    if note then
        return get_note_number(note) - 1
    end
    return "MISSING"
end

subs.next = function(ctx)
    local note = ctx.partial_note
    if note then
        return get_note_number(note) + 1
    end
    return "MISSING"
end

Or something to that effect

[arnold-c]

Thanks very much. I'll have a think to see how I can implement something like this in my system