Daily notes & templates

Two habits that most note-taking starts with: somewhere to put today’s thinking, and a shape you do not have to retype. Both ship as ordinary pages, so everything else in Subspace (links, permissions, search, undo, the filesystem bridge) applies to them without special cases.

Daily notes

Visit /daily/2026-07-18 and the page for that day is there. If it does not exist yet it is created on the spot; if it does, you get the one you already have. Press ⌘K and run Today to jump to the current day, or use the Previous, Today, and Next links in the page header to step one day at a time.

A daily note is an ordinary page in every respect. Its title and slug are the bare date, so /p/2026-07-18 reaches the same page, and it carries metadata.daily.date, which means a saved query can select daily notes like any other page data. The daily/ directory appears the first time you open a daily note rather than sitting empty from install.

Today is your today

The date comes from your own device’s clock, not the server’s. A note opened at 9pm in Auckland is that day’s note, not the previous day’s in UTC. The server only validates the date you asked for, so an impossible one such as 2026-02-30 is rejected instead of quietly creating a page.

Templates

Any page you put directly inside the templates directory becomes insertable. With a page open, press ⌘K and run Insert template: name.

1. Create the template

   Make an ordinary page inside templates and write the outline you want to reuse. Nesting, elements, and node properties are all copied.

2. Insert it

   On any page, ⌘K, then Insert template: name. The template’s whole bullet tree is appended below whatever is already on the page, as a single undoable edit. Nothing is overwritten, so inserting the same template twice gives you two copies rather than a tangle.

3. Fill in the variables

   Write {{name}} anywhere in the template’s text, elements, or properties. Two variables are always available: {{date}} (the date of the daily note you are on, or today’s date elsewhere) and {{title}} (the target page’s title, which on a daily note is the date). A variable with no value renders as nothing at all, so a partly filled template still produces a clean outline instead of a page littered with {{placeholder}} text.

Only pages directly inside templates are offered, so grouping them into subfolders hides them from the list. Templates follow the usual page permissions: a template you cannot read is not shown to you at all.

A template for every day

Name a template page daily and it is copied into each new daily note the first time you open it. Later visits leave the page alone, so your own edits are never overwritten by the template.

Name it by title, not slug

The daily/ directory already occupies the slug daily, and slugs are unique across the whole graph, so your template page will be stored under some other slug. What matters is that its title is daily. Create the page inside templates, title it daily, and it is picked up whatever slug it ends up with.

Palette only, for now

Both Today and Insert template are command palette actions. There is no slash command, no sidebar entry, and no button on the page. There is also no template manager: you author a template by creating a page in templates, like any other page.

Related

Pages & directoriesSlugs, aliases, directories, and how the sidebar tree is built.

ViewsSaved queries that can select daily notes by their metadata.

Page metadataThe JSON metadata that daily notes stamp and queries read.

Keyboard shortcutsThe command palette and the rest of the shortcut surface.