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Diary View

Diary View is an Obsidian community plugin that turns your daily notes into a notebook-style diary view. It focuses on a calm reading and writing experience: recent daily notes are shown as pages, the current note can be previewed or edited in place, and small details such as a daily quote and weather icon can be stored directly in each note's frontmatter.

Features

• Open a dedicated diary view from the ribbon icon or the Open diary view command.
• Browse the latest seven daily notes with a page-like layout and flip animation.
• Preview rendered Markdown or switch to editing without leaving the diary view.
• Edit the prompt text at the top of the right page. The text is saved to frontmatter as daily-quote by default.
• Optionally fetch a daily quote from a user-configured API. The plugin requests it only when a note does not already have the configured quote property, then caches it in frontmatter.
• Customize the weather icon for a note from frontmatter with daily-weather by default.
• Replace the default artwork with a note-specific image from frontmatter with daily-image.
• Preserve daily note frontmatter while editing the body content.
• Full English and Chinese localization — auto-detects your Obsidian locale, or pick a language in settings.
• Configurable calendar week — choose whether the week starts on Monday or Sunday.
• Custom weekend days — select which days are highlighted as weekend in the calendar.

Frontmatter

Diary View reads and writes a few optional frontmatter fields in your daily notes.

---
daily-quote: "Write one sentence that belongs to today."
daily-weather: cloud-sun
daily-image: "https://example.com/photo.jpg"
daily-mood: smile
---

daily-quote is shown in the prompt card at the top of the right page and can be edited directly from the diary view. Clearing the prompt keeps an empty daily-quote value, so an API quote will not overwrite your manual choice on the next render. The quote property name can be changed in settings.

daily-weather stores the weather for the day. Click the weather icon in the page header to open the built-in picker and select an icon. You can also set it manually in frontmatter — the value can be a Lucide icon name (e.g. sun, cloud-rain), or common weather words which are automatically mapped to icons. The weather property name can be changed in settings.

daily-image replaces the default illustration on the left page. The value can be a URL (https://…), a vault-relative path (photos/sunset.jpg), or a wikilink (![[sunset.jpg]]). If this field is empty or missing, Diary View shows the built-in artwork — or, when Use first image as artwork is enabled, the first image found in the note body. The image property name can be changed in settings.

daily-mood stores the selected mood icon for the day. Click the mood area on the left page to open the built-in picker. You can also set it manually in frontmatter using a Lucide icon name or the mood's display description. Custom mood icons can be added in settings. The mood property name can be changed in settings.

Settings

Open Settings → Community plugins → Diary View to configure:

• Language — Display language for the diary view UI. Auto-detects your Obsidian locale on first use.
• Start of week — Choose whether the calendar week starts on Monday (default) or Sunday.
• Weekend days — Select which days are highlighted as weekend in the calendar. Defaults to Saturday and Sunday.
• Daily note heading — Optional Markdown headings to read and write. Enter multiple headings on separate lines, or separate them with commas or semicolons. The first matching heading is used; if none exist, the first configured heading is created.
• Quote frontmatter key — Frontmatter property used to read and save the daily quote. Defaults to daily-quote.
• Daily quote API — Optional URL for a daily quote endpoint. The response can be plain text or JSON using common fields such as hitokoto, quote, content, text, sentence, message, or data.
• Weather frontmatter key — Frontmatter property used to read the daily weather icon. Defaults to daily-weather.
• Image frontmatter key — Frontmatter property used to read the diary image URL or path. Defaults to daily-image.
• Use first image as artwork — When enabled and no image frontmatter is set, the first image in the daily note is used as the diary artwork. When disabled, the default illustration is shown.
• Mood frontmatter key — Frontmatter property used to read and save the daily mood icon. Defaults to daily-mood.
• Custom mood icons — Add custom Lucide icon names and descriptions. Icons appear alongside the built-in mood icons in the diary view.

The plugin works offline by default. It only makes network requests when you add a Daily quote API URL.

Daily Notes

Diary View uses Obsidian's daily notes configuration when available:

• folder decides where notes are stored.
• format decides the note filename pattern.

If no daily notes configuration is found, Diary View falls back to notes named YYYY-MM-DD.md at the vault root.

Installation

For local development or manual testing, copy these files into:

<Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/diary-view/

Required files:

• main.js
• manifest.json
• styles.css

Then reload Obsidian and enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

Install dependencies:

npm install

Start the development build:

npm run dev

Create a production build:

npm run build

Inspiration

This plugin's notebook mood, diary-first interaction model, and page-turning presentation were inspired by Dear Diary:

• Dear Diary repository: https://github.com/thebuggeddev/dear-diary
• Dear Diary demo: https://dear-diary-three.vercel.app/

Diary View is an Obsidian plugin built around local daily notes and vault frontmatter. It does not depend on Dear Diary at runtime.