What?

Windsurf helped me whip up a neovim plugin for my daily notes workflows. It has a few features that make my note taking workflow day-to-day a tiny bit more fluid

Context

I learned about the concept of a zettlekasten recently and it really spoke to me. I've sought for YEARS to have a nice note-taking workflow, where I never think about where to put something, it's searchable, portable to some degree, and customizable... I've used OneNote and its derivatives, different self-hosted container based note taking apps, raw markdown files scattered on my file system, etc... I think I've finally landed on a solution which is basically this blog + some tooling to achieve the things I want...

• markata is the build system, it's what lets me keep all my notes in markdown files, and build them into a cohesive searchable experience on the web
• neovim is my primary note taking environment - using tools like marksman I get the ability to "jump" to wiki-linked posts and grep content easily for searching
• copier is used for generating note templates - whether it's a til, blog post, or starting my daily note page - copier makes it quick to stub out the file in the right place with the right tags and frontmatter for markata

Usage

I'll explain the daily notes workflow here, the code is below...

There's basically just a couple things I wanted smoothed out in my note-taking as I am getting started here...

1. I need an immediate way to get to my daily notes page... I have started keeping a new note for each day and it's a chore to copy paste the old note, update the date, delete content, etc... instead check_and_open_daily_note checks the directory I keep my daily notes in pages/daily in my blog repo, checks the date for a note for today and either creates it from the copier template or opened it as my current buffer

I could maybe improve this by making it global so that no matter what directory I'm in I could open the daily note with a keymap or lua function call instead of swapping tmux sessions and then opening the file

2. I need a way to link to yesterday's notes so it's easy to "go to definition" on the wiki link which opens the file...
3. I wanted to track page linking... this is something core for me as I am building out my personal knowledge base, but I have key areas in my life where I want to see graphical links, or at least make it easy to trace thoughts I've had like clicking through wikipedia, so the find_backlinks function brings up a menu of all the pages that link to the one I'm in

I'm sure I'll add more functions as time goes on - it'd be ncie to open certain slash pages like now with a keymap... drop me a note at [email protected] if you've got any great ideas!

Code

My dotfiles are private at the moment for work reasons, and the plugin is in there but here's the start of the code!

        
---@diagnostic disable: undefined-global
-- vim is a global in Neovim Lua scripts
local M = {}

function M.check_and_open_daily_note()
  local daily_dir = "pages/daily"
  local today = os.date("%Y-%m-%d")
  local pattern = string.format("%s/%s*-notes.md", daily_dir, today)
  -- Check if today's note exists
  local files = vim.fn.glob(pattern, false, true)

  if vim.tbl_isempty(files) then
    -- Create new note via copier
    os.execute("copier copy ~/dotfiles/copier/.copier_templates/daily .")

    -- Re-glob to get the new file (may need to wait a moment for creation)
    vim.wait(500, function()
      return not vim.tbl_isempty(vim.fn.glob(pattern, false, true))
    end, 10)

    files = vim.fn.glob(pattern, false, true)
  end

  -- Open the note (if multiple, just pick the first)
  if not vim.tbl_isempty(files) then
    vim.cmd("edit " .. files[1])
  else
    print("Failed to find or create today's note.")
  end
  vim.cmd("mode")
end

-- Find and copy a wikilink to the most recent previous daily note
function M.copy_previous_daily_wikilink()
  local daily_dir = "pages/daily"
  local today = os.date("%Y-%m-%d")

  -- Get all daily note files
  local pattern = string.format("%s/*-notes.md", daily_dir)
  local all_files = vim.fn.glob(pattern, false, true)

  if vim.tbl_isempty(all_files) then
    vim.notify("No daily notes found", vim.log.levels.WARN)
    return
  end

  -- Sort files by date (newest first)
  table.sort(all_files, function(a, b)
    -- Extract dates from filenames
    local date_a = a:match("/(%d%d%d%d%-%d%d%-%d%d)")
    local date_b = b:match("/(%d%d%d%d%-%d%d%-%d%d)")

    if not date_a or not date_b then
      return false
    end

    return date_a > date_b
  end)

  -- Find the most recent note before today
  local previous_note = nil
  for _, file in ipairs(all_files) do
    local date = file:match("/(%d%d%d%d%-%d%d%-%d%d)")
    if date and date < today then
      previous_note = file
      break
    end
  end

  if not previous_note then
    vim.notify("No previous daily notes found", vim.log.levels.WARN)
    return
  end

  -- Extract the slug (filename without extension)
  local filename = vim.fn.fnamemodify(previous_note, ":t")
  local slug = filename:match("(.+)%..+$") or filename

  -- Create wikilink format
  local wikilink = "[[ " .. slug .. " ]]"

  -- Copy to system clipboard
  vim.fn.setreg("+", wikilink)
  vim.notify("Copied previous daily note link: " .. wikilink, vim.log.levels.INFO)
end

function M.find_daily_files()
  require("telescope.builtin").find_files({
    cwd = "pages/daily",
    sorting_strategy = "ascending",
  })
end

function M.find_backlinks()
  local slug = vim.fn.expand("%:t:r")
  if slug == "" then
    print("Cannot find backlinks for a file without a name.")
    return
  end

  local pattern = string.format("\\[\\[[\\s]*%s[\\s]*\\]\\]", slug)
  require("telescope.builtin").live_grep({
    default_text = pattern,
    search_dirs = { "pages" },
    prompt_title = "Backlinks for [[" .. slug .. "]]",
    additional_args = { "--pcre2" },
  })
end

-- Create user command for copying previous daily note wikilink
vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("CopyPreviousDailyLink", M.copy_previous_daily_wikilink, {})

return M