Today I Learnt

Track focused study sessions in Obsidian and see what you studied in your daily note, with optional recall questions to test what stuck.

Start a session, study in your vault as usual, stop the session. Today I Learnt records which notes you worked on, for how long and how you moved between them, then writes it into that day's daily note. Turn on Grill me to also get questions on what you studied.

Features

• Explicit start / stop — two commands, Start study session and Stop study session, or click the ribbon icon or status bar. The status bar shows how long the session has run.
• Automatic capture of vault activity during a session:
  • notes opened, created, modified, renamed, deleted
  • time spent per note
  • links followed between notes
  • tags added
• Your path through the notes — a clickable diagram and a linked chain showing the order you visited notes and whether you got there by following a link.
• Grill me (optional) — recall questions on what you studied, written by Claude (bring your own API key). Questions are grounded in your own notes and link back to them.
• Works offline — with Grill me off, nothing leaves your device. With Grill me on but no key, or if the API call fails, you get simple offline questions built from your session.
• Daily-note integration — respects your Daily Notes / Periodic Notes folder, date format and template. The note is created if it doesn't exist yet.
• Safe editing — the plugin only ever writes inside its own marked block. The rest of your daily note is never touched.
• Crash-safe — a running session is saved every 30 seconds and picked up again after a reload.

What it looks like

After stopping a session, your daily note gets a block like this:

%% study-session:start id=2026-10-20T09-03-12-000Z-session %%
> [!study] Study session · 09:03–09:51 · 48m
> **Notes:** 3 touched, 1 created
>
> **Path**
> ```mermaid
> flowchart LR
>     n0["Kafka"]
>     n1["Partitioning"]
>     n2["Consumer Groups"]
>     n0 --> n1
>     n1 -.-> n2
>     class n0,n1,n2 internal-link;
> ```
> [[Kafka]] → [[Partitioning]] → [[Consumer Groups]]
>
> **Grill me**
> *How Kafka scales reads without giving up ordering.*
> 1. Why does [[Partitioning]] only guarantee order within a partition, not across a topic?
> 2. What happens in [[Consumer Groups]] when a consumer joins mid-stream?
%% study-session:end %%

In the diagram, solid arrows mean you followed a link; dotted arrows mean you got there another way (search, file explorer, quick switcher). Click a node to open the note.

The %% … %% lines are Obsidian comments, hidden in reading view. They let the plugin find its own block. Each session gets its own block, so several sessions in a day stack up.

Usage

1. Open the command palette (Cmd/Ctrl + P).
2. Run Start study session.
3. Study as usual — open notes, follow links, write, tag.
4. Run Stop study session.
5. Open today's daily note to see the session.

No hotkeys are assigned by default. Add your own under Settings → Hotkeys if you like.

Settings

Daily note

Grill me (off by default; the options below appear when it's on)

Privacy & network use

Please read this before turning on Grill me with an API key.

• Grill me off, or no API key: the plugin makes no network requests. Everything stays on your device.
• Grill me on with an API key: when a session stops, the plugin sends session data to Anthropic's Claude API (api.anthropic.com) to write the questions. This includes note titles, tags, time spent, the order you visited notes, and — if Send note content is on — excerpts of up to 10 notes you worked on (at most 1,500 characters each). See Anthropic's privacy policy.
• Your API key is stored in plain text in .obsidian/plugins/today-i-learnt/data.json. If you sync your vault (Obsidian Sync, iCloud, git, etc.), the key syncs with it. Don't commit this file to a public repository.
• API usage is billed to your own Anthropic account.
• The plugin has no telemetry and never reads files outside your vault.

What is and isn't captured

Captured (inside your vault only): Markdown notes opened, created, modified, renamed, deleted; time per note; links followed; tags added.

Not captured: anything outside Obsidian — browser activity, web searches, other apps — and reading position inside PDFs.

Time per note counts the time a note was the active one. Long idle gaps are capped at 20 minutes so leaving Obsidian open doesn't inflate your study time.

Where data is stored

• Session blocks: in your daily notes.
• Session records: one JSON file per session in .obsidian/plugins/today-i-learnt/sessions/, holding the raw activity and questions. They are kept out of your visible notes.

Installation

From the community directory

Search for Today I Learnt in Settings → Community plugins → Browse (once published).

Via BRAT (beta testing)

Install the BRAT plugin, then add sukritaz/today-i-learnt-extension as a beta plugin.

Manual install

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Create the folder <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/today-i-learnt/ and put the three files in it.
3. In Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → reload the list → enable Today I Learnt.

Development

Requires Node.js 20+.

npm install
npm run dev     # rebuild on every change
npm run build   # production build
npm run lint    # lint with Obsidian's rules
npm test        # unit tests

For local testing, link this folder into a test vault (not your real one):

ln -s "$(pwd)" /path/to/test-vault/.obsidian/plugins/today-i-learnt

Install Hot-Reload in the test vault to reload the plugin automatically after each build.

The product spec, including the code layout, is in docs/PRD.md.

License

MIT