Templates

Templates live in the library’s templateFolder (default Templates). Creating a note from a template substitutes {{placeholders}} and merges the template’s frontmatter into the new note.

Commands in the editor

In a note under the template folder, the editor gives every {{…}} the engine answers a color of its own (template in the theme), arguments and filters included, so the placeholders stand apart from the Markdown around them. A {{…}} that names no command stays plain, so a typo reads as one before the template is used. A note outside the template folder colors nothing.

Placeholders

Substitution, not a language — unknown {{…}} is copied verbatim:

Date formats use the tokens you already know: YYYY MM DD HH mm ss, plus D / M / H / m / s without the leading zero, dddd / ddd for the weekday’s name, MMMM / MMM for the month’s (in the app’s language), WW for the ISO week and Q for the quarter — and date arithmetic, see filters. {{folder}} and {{title}}-style self-references inside directives resolve against the creation context.

Filters

Append with |: {{title|slug}}, {{date:YYYY-MM-DD|+7d}}, {{counter:quest|pad:3}}. Known filters: case (upper, lower, title), slug, trim, numeric padding (pad:3), and date moves (+7d, +1y, startof:month, … — applied left to right, before case filters). Moves apply only to {{date}}, {{time}} and {{now}}, and only as the first filters: {{date|+1d|upper}} works, while {{date|upper|+1d}} and {{title|+1d}} are left standing. A move in days or weeks counts calendar days, not 24 hours, so +1d is always the next date — a clock change does not make it repeat a day. {{cursor}} takes no filters.

Checking a template

A template can be read before it is used, and what the tables above accept is exactly what the checker accepts: it reads the engine’s own vocabulary — the placeholder names, the filter names and the date tokens — and asks the engine’s own rules whether a filter applies where it stands, so a name added to the engine is a name the checker already knows. It reports three kinds of mistake:

• braces that do not pair up: {{title, {{ {{title}}, {{}}, and a | with no filter after it: {{title|}};
• a placeholder, filter or date token the engine does not answer: {{titlex}}, {{title|upperr}}, {{date:YYYYY}};
• an argument the engine cannot read, or a filter where it does not apply: {{title|pad:wide}}, {{date|+xd}}, {{time:HH'|mm}}, {{ask:}}, {{counter}}, {{date|upper|+1d}}, {{cursor|upper}}.

Only an opening brace pair is reported. A }} with nothing open before it is text the engine leaves exactly as written, so LaTeX ($x^{2^{n}}$) and inline JSON ({"a":{"b":1}}) in a body are not mistakes.

Each mistake says where it is, what is wrong, and — where the correction is deterministic and safe — the text that fixes it. A name within two edits of exactly one known one is suggested: {{titlex}} → {{title}}, {{title|upperr}} → {{title|upper}}, {{date:YYYYY}} → {{date:YYYY}}. A stray | and the filters on a caret are dropped: {{title|}} → {{title}}, {{cursor|upper}} → {{cursor}}. A suggestion is only ever text to apply over the mistake it is on; the checker rewrites nothing.

Where the fix would be a guess, there is no suggestion and the mistake is reported alone: two known names equally close ({{titel}} is two edits from both title and time), a pad: width that is not a number (only the author knows the width), a date move whose count is not one ({{date|+xd}}), a move out of its place ({{date|upper|+1d}} — before or after the case is the author’s call), a field with no label ({{ask:}}), a counter with no name ({{counter}}), and an unclosed {{ with text after it — closing that one would swallow a sentence the author wrote, so the checker points at it and stays quiet.

It reads the placeholders only: nothing is said about the Markdown around them, about the frontmatter, or about the niman: directives block, each of which has its own parser.

The checker runs in the editor, on the templates folder alone: a {{…}} in a note anywhere else is ordinary text. A template is read again a quarter of a second after typing stops — never on the keystroke itself — and each mistake is drawn as a wavy underline under the span it is on, in the colour the spelling’s own underline uses. Putting the caret in a marked span opens the hint: what is wrong, and, where a fix was computed, Did you mean …? with that fix as a single button. The tap applies it as one undoable edit and nothing is ever rewritten without it; where no fix is safe the hint says so and offers only Dismiss. A template with problems also carries a quiet count in the status row, and a clean one carries nothing at all.

A note being made from a template is not the template: the Fill in the template dialog edits no source, so the checker is not there.

File directives

A template’s frontmatter may carry creation directives — under a niman map of their own, so they never become properties of the note:

---
niman:
  folder: Journal/{{date:YYYY}}/{{date:MM}}
  filename: "{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} {{title}}"
---

folder / filename accept placeholders (resolved before the path is used). The remaining frontmatter merges into the new note. A niman block that does not parse declares nothing: the note is still created — in the folder the creation came from, under the name the template gives it — and a message says what the block’s problem is.

Edit this page on GitHub