Insert Current Date / Time

It’d be a nice feature to insert the current date or time with a reasonable shortcut, maybe from the coupler.

For my workflow, I make a note per day to keep as a short activity journal, I’ve come over from LogSeq which had a shortcut of / and “current time”. which would allow me to quickly prefix lines with the current time.

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Try TextExpander. I use it on both windows and iOS and find its flexibility in building expansions is good enough for me to get the date and time expanded into a format I really like and works in file names.

Hi @nikdoof, welcome to the Supernotes Community!

This is an interesting proposal. I’m wondering if we can improve this even further and add dynamic variables into the existing “templates” option in the coupler. So you write ${current time} or ${current date} in the template it will convert it automatically.

In the meantime, as @JohnJ mentioned, there’s lots of OS wide tools that can do this functionality (which might even be better from a workflow perspective, so you can use the same shortcut in messaging apps as well). Raycast is another app that can do this and has been mentioned a couple times here in the forum.

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@Tobias, Working the date/time into tempIates sounds good to me, and I would definitely use it. Could these proposed date/time variables be used in card titles? The current date would be useful with options for British, American, and standard international formats.

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Upvoting this feature request - it’d be great to have this to use with templates or even just as a button (like Drafts does it). One hotkey to insert a formatted date/time would be very useful, especially if possible for use in card titles as mentioned.

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It would be nice to be able to customize the date format as well, like in moment.js.
This way user’s could control what gets pasted, e.g. “YYYY-MM-DD ddd”

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I would like to be able to use something like “@today”, “@time”, etc for both cards and templates as a way to get the current date/time auto-expanded.

Thanks for the feature request. Can you tell us more about why you want this feature?

@connor I see the simplest use-case in templates. Personally, I am a new user trying to migrate from Obsidian. One use case I apply with obsidian is daily work notes from templates. The easy organizational pattern for naming notes in this use-case is <<current-day/current-month>> - daily note, or something similar. It creates a note in a snap and always follows the same pattern.

Hope that makes sense!

@fuzzy.beach Why not use a specialised text expander tool for this? I use Raycast’s snippets for the exact use case you mention, and for all my notecard templates.

The advantage of using a text expander, is you can use the same templates across all the software you use, rather than just Supernotes.

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@JamesT It’s functionality that I’d expect to have within the tool that implements templating. Sure, I could use Raycast, but as far as I remember raycast wants a pro subscription for over a certain number of snippets, syncing them, etc.

As a developer I understand the need for a subscription based product, but as a user I hate the amount of subscription bloat that comes with having to use multiple tools for what I’d consider one use case of notes (albeit it’s very broad of course) and the hefty monthly/yearly fees that add up.

@fuzzy.beach
I am using iOS Shortcuts for those automations. Maybe they would work for you, too.

+1 to the general notion of supporting at least some template variables. Some obsidian extensions and other zettelkasten tools like zk allow you to use randomly generated title strings, I think something like that would be especially useful for supernotes (you could even just have a variable to insert the card ID) since its strong organizational features make it a better fit for producing lots of ‘untitled’ cards. These cards don’t need semantic titles, but it’d be useful to give them some kind of semi-random string as a title for outline rendering, linking, and other purposes.

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+1 to this idea!

I write cards every day and enter the date in the title, but I don’t want to use the inconvenient number keys :slight_smile: