Better Calendar
Xheldon269 downloadsA compact, space-filling calendar for your daily notes — open or create them from your template, and mark days that match your own highlight rules.
- Overview
- Scorecard
- Updates4
A space-efficient calendar for Obsidian that shows your daily notes, creates them from your template, and highlights days that match your own rules.
It started from the idea behind the popular Calendar plugin, but fixes its biggest annoyance: in a tall or wide pane the classic calendar just stretches a single month and wastes the rest of the space. Better Calendar instead fills the available area with more months while keeping each day cell a comfortable size.
Features
- Daily-note dots. Reads your core Daily notes settings (folder, date format, template) and shows a gray dot on every day that already has a note.
- Click to open or create. Click a day to open its note. If none exists yet,
you're asked whether to create one — the new note is placed in your daily-notes
folder and filled in from your template (
{{title}},{{date}},{{date:FORMAT}},{{time}}, …). The confirmation can be turned off. - Space-filling layout. Days render by week, and weeks flow
left-to-right, wrapping to the next line when the row is full:
- A wider pane fits more weeks per row.
- A taller pane fits more rows of weeks.
- Each day cell stays within a minimum / maximum size you set, so space is filled with more calendar — not bigger boxes. Left-over space gently grows the cells up to the maximum.
- Smart "today" placement. By default today's week starts the 3rd row, with two rows of recent weeks above it, so you land on today with its recent history already in view. The ‹ › buttons move the view by one month; Today snaps back.
- Month cues without clutter. Thin gray divider lines separate the months, and the 1st of each month shows a faint centered watermark of the month's name (the year on Jan 1).
- Custom highlights. Add rules that test each daily note against a regular
expression and drop a colored dot on matching days — for example
^## 今日运动to see at a glance which days you exercised.
Requirements
The core Daily notes plugin must be enabled (Settings → Core plugins → Daily notes). Better Calendar reads its New file location, Date format, and Template file location to find and create your notes.
Usage
- Better Calendar appears as a tab in the right sidebar (the calendar icon in the sidebar's tab strip); you can also open or focus it with the command “Better Calendar: Open calendar.” Drag it anywhere, including the main editor area, where the extra width lets it show several months at once.
- Click a day to open/create its note.
Ctrl/Cmd-click opens it in a new tab. - The day of the note you're currently viewing is ringed; dots under each date show note presence and any matched highlight rules.
Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Start week on | First day of the week, or follow the locale default. |
| Confirm before creating new note | Ask before creating a missing daily note. |
| Show week number | Add a week-number column to each month block. |
| Minimum / Maximum day size | Clamp the day-cell edge (px). Drives how many months fit. |
| Month divider / Day hover color | Divider defaults to a theme gray, hover to the theme accent; either can be custom. |
| Override locale | Use a different locale for weekday / month names. |
| Highlights | Regex (+ flags) + color rules; matching days get a colored dot. |
Highlight rules
Each rule is a JavaScript regular expression tested against the full text of
the day's note. The g flag is ignored (matching is stateless); m
(multiline) and i (case-insensitive) are useful. Examples:
| Goal | Pattern | Flags |
|---|---|---|
| Mark days with an exercise log | ^## 今日运动 |
m |
| Mark days that mention a book | #reading\b |
i |
Installation
This repository contains the plugin source. To build and install it:
npm install
npm run build # produces main.js
Then copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into
<your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/better-calendar/ and enable Better Calendar
in Settings → Community plugins. (You can also point BRAT
at this repo.)
Development
npm install
npm run dev # esbuild watch → rebuilds main.js on change
npm run typecheck # tsc --noEmit
The code is split into small modules: pure grid math (layout.ts), daily-note
access (dailyNotes.ts), highlight evaluation + caching (highlights.ts), the
view (view.ts), settings (settings.ts / settingsTab.ts), and the plugin
entry point (main.ts).
License
MIT