Journal Bases
Sébastien Dubois4k downloadsCustom Base views for journaling and periodic reviews
- Overview
- Scorecard
- Updates32
Navigate and manage your journal and periodic reviews with purpose-built Base views. This Obsidian plugin adds two custom view types for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes.
Why This Plugin?
Journaling and periodic reviews are powerful practices for personal growth, but they can be labor-intensive. The core process is simple but requires discipline:
- Review daily notes once a week to extract key learnings, discoveries, challenges faced, achievements, things you're grateful for, etc., and create a weekly note as a result
- Review weekly notes once a month to extract key learnings, discoveries, and create a monthly note
- Review monthly notes once a quarter to create a quarterly note
- Review quarterly notes once a year to create a yearly note
Thanks to this process, at the end of a full year, you get a single yearly note that is a valuable summary of that year, giving you clarity about what you achieved, mistakes you've made, and things you've learned.
In addition to capturing information about the past, periodic notes also enable looking forward and planning ahead.
This plugin aims to codify and ease this process by providing dedicated views that make journaling and periodic reviews a breeze.
Overview Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHdccDohK10
The Two Views
This plugin provides two specialized Base view types, each designed for a specific workflow:
| View | Purpose | Workflow |
|---|---|---|
| Periodic Notes | Daily journaling | Navigate, view, edit, and create notes of a single period type |
| Periodic Review | Periodic reviews | Side-by-side comparison across all period types for extracting insights |
Periodic Notes Base
The Periodic Notes view is designed to support daily journaling with easier navigation between notes of a specific category (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly).
What It Does
- Lists all notes for the selected period type in descending order (newest first)
- Enables folding/expanding individual notes to focus on what matters
- Provides inline editing so you can write without leaving the view
- Allows creating new notes for future periods
- Shows placeholders for missing notes in the sequence with one-click creation
- Highlights the current period so you always know where "today" is
Use Cases
- Morning journaling routine
- Quick review of recent daily entries
- Batch-creating notes for upcoming days/weeks
- Filling in gaps when you missed a day
Screenshot
Browse your daily notes as expandable cards with inline editing. Toggle between Reading, Live Preview, and Source mode.
View Options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Period type | Which period type to display (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly) |
| Future periods | Number of future periods to show (0-12) |
| Expand first card | Auto-expand the most recent note on load |
| Show missing periods | Show create buttons for missing notes in the sequence |
Periodic Review Base
The Periodic Review view has a different goal: serve during periodic reviews (weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews) and make it a breeze to integrate information from daily notes into weekly notes, weekly into monthly, monthly into quarterly, and quarterly into yearly.
What It Does
This view provides a multi-column layout (inspired by Andy Matuschak's sliding panes) where you can:
- Select or create a yearly note, then
- Select or create a quarterly note, then
- Select or create a monthly note, then
- Select or create a weekly note, then
- See all daily notes for that week
The magic is in the hierarchical drilling:
- Select a certain week → see all daily notes from that week in the column to the left
- Select a certain month → see all weeks in that month
- Select a certain quarter → see all months in that quarter
- Select a certain year → see all quarters in that year
This makes it effortless to review your daily notes, extract the key insights, and write them into your weekly summary. Then review your weekly summaries and extract insights into your monthly note. And so on up the hierarchy.
The Periodic Review Workflow
- Open the Periodic Review view at the start of your weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly review
- Navigate to the period you want to review (e.g., select last week)
- Read through the child notes in the left column (e.g., daily notes for that week)
- Extract key learnings into the parent note (e.g., your weekly summary)
- Mark the review as done for that period (optional)
- Repeat at each level of the hierarchy
Use Cases
- Weekly reviews: synthesizing daily notes into a weekly summary
- Monthly reviews: extracting themes from weekly notes
- Quarterly reviews: identifying patterns across months
- Yearly reviews: creating your annual summary
Screenshot
Review and edit notes across multiple period types in a multi-column layout. Each column shows a note card with full inline editing support. Click a period to drill down into its children.
Additional Screenshots
Mark Reviews as DONE
Mark reviews as done to know where you left things off
Minimize Columns
Collapse columns to focus on specific period types. Click the fold button to expand/collapse.
Create Missing Notes
Create buttons appear for periods without notes. Uses Templater templates when configured.
Create Future Yearly Notes
Create next year's note directly from the yearly column header.
View Options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Show columns | Toggle visibility for each period type |
| Column width | Width of each column in pixels (300-600) |
Common Features
Both views share these capabilities:
Note Cards
- Inline editing: Edit notes directly within the view without opening a separate tab
- Auto-save: Changes saved automatically with 1-second debounce
- Current period highlight: Visual indicator for today's/current period's note
- Seamless updates: Content updates smoothly without flickering when files change externally
Note Creation
- Missing note placeholders: Create buttons for periods without notes
- Template support: Uses Templater for template-based note creation
- Folder creation: Automatically creates nested folder structures
Commands
- Open notes: Open (and create if missing) the current, previous or next note for any enabled period type — straight from the command palette
- Mark reviews done: Toggle the done state of the current period's note, cascading to its children
- Bulk create: Create all missing current-period notes at once
Integration
- Periodic Notes plugin sync: Automatically syncs settings when Periodic Notes plugin is enabled
- Templater support: Full integration for template-based note creation
- Life Tracker integration: Provides daily notes for Life Tracker commands (works in both views)
- What's new after updates. After a plugin update, a one-time dialog shows the release notes you just received (including skipped versions) with ways to support development. Never shown on fresh installs or regular restarts.
Getting Started
Prerequisites
- Obsidian v1.9.0 or later (requires Bases feature)
- (Optional) Periodic Notes plugin for settings sync
- (Optional) Templater plugin for template support
Installation
Community plugins (recommended)
- In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins.
- Disable Restricted mode if it's enabled.
- Select Browse, search for Journal Bases, install it, then enable it.
You can also browse the catalog on the Obsidian Community website.
Manual installation
If the plugin isn't listed in the community catalog yet (or you want a specific version):
- Download
main.js,manifest.json, andstyles.cssfrom the latest release. - Copy them into
<Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/journal-bases/. - Reload Obsidian and enable Journal Bases in Settings → Community plugins.
BRAT (bleeding edge)
BRAT (Beta Reviewers Auto-update Tool) installs plugins straight from a GitHub repo and keeps them updated automatically. Use this if you want the latest commits — things might break.
- Install Obsidian42 - BRAT from Settings → Community plugins → Browse and enable it.
- Run BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing from the command palette.
- Paste
https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-journal-base. - Select the latest version and confirm.
- Enable Journal Bases in Settings → Community plugins.
Configuration
- Go to Settings → Journal Bases
- Configure each period type:
- Folder: Where notes are stored (e.g.,
Journal/Daily) - Format: Filename format using Moment.js tokens (e.g.,
YYYY-MM-DD) - Template: Path to Templater template file (optional)
- Folder: Where notes are stored (e.g.,
If you have the Periodic Notes plugin enabled, settings will sync automatically.
Using the Views
- Create a new Base (or open an existing one)
- Configure the Base query to include your periodic notes folder
- Click the view type dropdown and select Periodic Notes or Periodic Review
- Configure view-specific options via the settings menu
Date Format Reference
Uses Moment.js format tokens:
| Token | Output | Example |
|---|---|---|
YYYY |
4-digit year | 2025 |
MM |
2-digit month | 01-12 |
DD |
2-digit day | 01-31 |
gggg |
ISO week year | 2025 |
ww |
ISO week | 01-53 |
[Q] |
Literal "Q" | Q |
Q |
Quarter | 1-4 |
[text] |
Literal text | text |
Default formats:
- Daily:
YYYY-MM-DD - Weekly:
gggg-[W]ww - Monthly:
YYYY-MM - Quarterly:
YYYY-[Q]Q - Yearly:
YYYY
Formats can include path separators: YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD creates 2025/12/2025-12-18.md
Contributing
This is a free and open source project. All contributions are welcome:
- Code improvements and new features
- Ideas and feature requests
- Documentation improvements
- Bug reports
See the issues and discussions in this repository.
My other Obsidian plugins
| Plugin | What it does |
|---|---|
| Agentic Resource Discovery Server | Local-first Agentic Resource Discovery publisher and registry that serves your AI skills and tools to agents over a local HTTP and MCP server |
| Book Exporter | Export books (one manifest note + linked chapter notes) to EPUB and PDF via Pandoc |
| Bookshelf Base | Display your notes as a visual bookshelf via a custom Bases view |
| Dataview Serializer | Serialize Dataview queries to Markdown, and keep the Markdown representation up to date |
| Expander | Replace variables across your vault using HTML comment markers. Supports static values and dynamic functions |
| Ghost Publish | Publish your vault notes to a Ghost blog with configurable presets for tags, newsletters, and frontmatter conventions |
| Graph Explorer Base View | A custom Bases view that renders notes as an interactive force-directed graph with explored/unexplored tracking |
| Hidden Folders Access | Index hidden root-level folders (e.g. .claude) so they appear in the file tree, metadata cache, and Bases |
| Kanban Action Planner | Render your notes as configurable Kanban boards and calendars inside Bases, with statuses, ordering, relationships, and scheduling |
| Life Tracker | Capture and visualize the data that matters in your life |
| Note Village | A 2D pixel art village where your notes become villagers you can explore and chat with using AI |
| Obsidian Starter Kit | Adds strong typing support and powerful automation support for notes |
| Remarkable Synchronizer | Connect to the reMarkable cloud, list, download, and sync notebook pages as images |
| Replicate | Use AI models with ease via the Replicate.com integration |
| REST and MCP server | Exposes CLI commands as RESTful API endpoints and an MCP server for AI tool integration |
| Time Machine | Browse, compare, and restore previous versions of your notes using built-in file-recovery snapshots |
| Transcriber | Transcribe images to markdown using Ollama vision models |
| Typefully | Publish social media posts with ease using the Typefully integration |
| Update Time | Automatically update front matter to include creation and last update times |
Everything I build is documented in my newsletter and on my YouTube channel.
News & support
To stay up to date about this plugin, Obsidian in general, Personal Knowledge Management and note-taking:
- Subscribe to my newsletter
- Subscribe to my YouTube channel
- Join the Knowii community and learn to organize your notes and put your knowledge to work, together with fellow knowledge workers
If this plugin is useful to you, here are the best ways to support my work ❤️:
- Join the Knowii community
- Become a GitHub Sponsor
- Buy me a coffee
- Subscribe to my YouTube channel
- Check out my products
Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue.