Today.nvim — Daily Notes with Neovim

This project can be found on GitHub

The project was inspired by my work in journaling with neovim where I use neovim as my go writing environment. Not just for work and for coding, but also daily notes I can use a scratchpad for thoughts or whatever I need.

I’ve found this to be an incredibly helpful tool for managing my concentration and grounding me when my ADHD brain starts spinning and jumping between tasks.

In that post I described how I made a small bash function to make and/or open a note in neovim for a given day. I noticed a large part of my workflow afterwards would involve switching between my existing neovim session and going to today’s note either to cross reference or use as a temporary paste bin. It was cumbersome to have to leave neovim and run today to get to my new note.

So I made a plugin that let me replicate the same functionality as my bash command, but also let me access my notes from any existing neovim session.

Installation and usage details are included in the README.md of the repository. I will go over a bit more in detail about how the project works.

How It Works

The plugin registered a new command in Neovim called Today that will use a configured local directory on the user’s system to create a new note for the day if it doesn’t already exist and create a new buffer for that note in neovim.

There are two configurations that can be set when using the plugin.

• local_root which set the directory where all the notes and templates are defined
• template the name of the template file to use for each new note.

The template should be a markdown file as the behavior creates a new note with the name of the date and a .md extension.

If no configuration is provided by the user then the ensure_default_setup function will be run and use the ~/.today path for storing and making all notes. This function will populate the directory if it doesn’t exist and copy the included default template jrnl.md to that directory.

It will then make a directory for each year and month and create the note files within those directories.

How It Was Built

I wrote this plugin with a large amount of help from Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 model.

All of the functionality of the plugin is defined in the lua/today/init.lua file.

There are 4 main symbols to look at.

1. The config table the contains the default configuration
2. The ensure_default_setup() function that will ensure that the default directory setup if no user configuration is provided
3. The today() function that contains the core logic of the plugin and is a translation of the bash function
4. The M.setup() is the setup function for the plugin that processes the user config and registers the neovim command Today to run today()