Background and motivation
I love Diarian, a lot. Before switching to Obsidian I was using DayOne for years.
DayOne is very opinionated about how everything is organized. Rather than a user-managed folder structure, you have different "journals" (e.g. personal, work, school, etc.) and you organize by picking a journal for each entry and then using tags for an extra layer of organization.
Here's an image of the four DayOne interface styles.
DayOne has four display modes for viewing entries: calendar, map, list, and cards. In Obsidian, I've partially been trying to replicate this UI with plugins, and I find that Diarian is similar to DayOne's calendar view. (DayOne also has a "on this day" view like Diarian.) Side note: The other views can be accomplished with other plugins (Map View, Cards View, and list view with Vault Explorer which also has a type of card view).
Similarities:
- Attractive calendar view
- Image thumbnails on days with notes with images
Differences:
- DayOne calendar view is scrollable
- I don't care; I'm happy and impressed with Diarian's ability to intuitively click back/forward to different months/years/decades
- Absent an image thumbnail, DayOne calendar shows colors to indicate which journal has entries on each day
- DayOne does not indicate how many entries there are on each day, while Diarian does this by showing multiple dots.
Requested features
While I love Diarian, I wish that the calendar supported more flexible organizational structures. Currently, in Diarian you must specify a single folder, which is used to populate the calendar and also where new notes are created, within which notes must follow an explicit and rigid storage/naming pattern in order for those notes to appear on the calendar. You can customize this pattern, but it's rigid nonetheless.
I'm requesting two features:
1. Multiple journal folders
- The user should be able to specify multiple journal folders, top-level folders in which the specified naming scheme can be used to create entries
- When creating a new entry, the user would be able to select in which journal folder the new note should be created.
- Notes of all journal folders would be populated in the calendar view
2. Additional calendar sources
In addition to populating the calendar from notes in the specified journal folders, I'd like for Diarian to allow the user to specify that multiple (or all) folders in the vault be utilized for populating the calendar. This would free users to organize notes according to project/subject/etc while still being able to see them on a consolidated calendar. This is similar to the Chronology plugin, but it would be nice to not need both it and Diarian, also Diarian's calendar view and display of notes beneath it are superior to Chronology IMO.
A suggested implementation follows. ([optional] items can be left out of the implementation entirely, or implemented at a later date)
- There will be a toggle in settings for "Additional calendar sources" to enable the use of non-journal folders for populating the calendar
- Notes in non-journal folders will appear in the calendar according to note creation date.
- To avoid clutter, the user can optionally specify calendar source folders using either an include list or an exclude list. Each would be a newline-separated list of top-level folders to include, e.g. "Journal, Personal, Work, School, etc." (but each on its own line)
- [optional] For finer control for clutter reduction, a file name-based exclusion list can be specified, as a newline-separated list of regex strings for which matching note file names will be excluded from the calendar
- [optional] The dots used to indicate notes on each day are colored to indicate the top-level folder in which each note resides. This color scheme could be determined automatically, or if you're up to it, specified in the settings somehow.
Background and motivation
I love Diarian, a lot. Before switching to Obsidian I was using DayOne for years.
DayOne is very opinionated about how everything is organized. Rather than a user-managed folder structure, you have different "journals" (e.g. personal, work, school, etc.) and you organize by picking a journal for each entry and then using tags for an extra layer of organization.
Here's an image of the four DayOne interface styles.
DayOne has four display modes for viewing entries: calendar, map, list, and cards. In Obsidian, I've partially been trying to replicate this UI with plugins, and I find that Diarian is similar to DayOne's calendar view. (DayOne also has a "on this day" view like Diarian.) Side note: The other views can be accomplished with other plugins (Map View, Cards View, and list view with Vault Explorer which also has a type of card view).
Similarities:
Differences:
Requested features
While I love Diarian, I wish that the calendar supported more flexible organizational structures. Currently, in Diarian you must specify a single folder, which is used to populate the calendar and also where new notes are created, within which notes must follow an explicit and rigid storage/naming pattern in order for those notes to appear on the calendar. You can customize this pattern, but it's rigid nonetheless.
I'm requesting two features:
1. Multiple journal folders
2. Additional calendar sources
In addition to populating the calendar from notes in the specified journal folders, I'd like for Diarian to allow the user to specify that multiple (or all) folders in the vault be utilized for populating the calendar. This would free users to organize notes according to project/subject/etc while still being able to see them on a consolidated calendar. This is similar to the Chronology plugin, but it would be nice to not need both it and Diarian, also Diarian's calendar view and display of notes beneath it are superior to Chronology IMO.
A suggested implementation follows. ([optional] items can be left out of the implementation entirely, or implemented at a later date)