Daily notes and templates

Daily notes

⌘D opens today’s note, creating it if it doesn’t exist. Before creating, Pellet checks the vault on disk as well as its own list of files, so a note that is there but not listed yet (the app is still reading the vault, or iCloud has not delivered it) is opened, never recreated over. They live in a Daily Notes folder by default.

A daily note is a good default home for anything without an obvious place — a call you took, a thought, a thing to look up. You can sort it out later, or never; search and links will still find it.

Templates

A template is just a note whose content gets copied into new notes. They live in a Templates folder.

Set them up in Settings:

• Default note template — applied to new notes
• Daily note template — applied when a daily note is created

These are separate on purpose. What you want in a blank note is rarely what you want in a day’s page.

Placeholders

Templates can carry placeholders that get filled in when the note is made:

Placeholder	Becomes
{{title}}	The note’s title
{{date}}	Today’s date, like 2026-08-03
{{time}}	The current time, like 09:05
{{date:FORMAT}} / {{time:FORMAT}}	The date or time in a format you choose (below)
{{yesterday}} / {{tomorrow}}	The day before or after. Both take a format too: {{tomorrow:dddd}}
{{date+1w}}	A date before or after: d days, w weeks, M months, y years, with + or -. Add a format after it: {{date-3d:D MMM}}
{{weekday}}	The day of the week, like Monday
{{folder}}	The folder the note is in (empty at the top of the vault)
{{vault}}	Your vault’s name
{{id}}	A short unique ID of 8 letters and digits. Used twice in one template, it is the same both times
{{quote}}	The quote of the day
{{cursor}}	Where your cursor goes once the template is in
{{selection}}	The text you had selected when you inserted the template with /

For a daily note, the date is that day’s, so a note made for yesterday still says yesterday. A month added to the 31st lands on the month’s last day: {{date+1M}} on 31 January gives 28 February.

While you edit a note in your Templates folder, type {{ to see every placeholder with what it would give right now. Pick one to put it in.

To wrap text in a template, select it, type / and pick the template: the text you selected goes where {{selection}} is.

FORMAT is made of these codes. The examples are for Monday 3 August 2026 at 9:05 in the morning:

Code	Gives	Example
YYYY / YY	Year	2026 / 26
Q	Quarter	3
MMMM / MMM	Month name, full or short	August / Aug
MM / M	Month number, with or without a leading zero	08 / 8
DD / D	Day of the month, with or without a leading zero	03 / 3
Do	Day of the month with its ending	3rd
dddd / ddd	Weekday, full or short	Monday / Mon
HH / H	Hour on the 24-hour clock, with or without a leading zero	09 / 9
hh / h	Hour on the 12-hour clock, with or without a leading zero	09 / 9
A / a	AM or PM	AM / am
mm	Minute	05
ss	Second	00
ww / w	Week number, with or without a leading zero	32 / 32

So {{date:dddd Do MMMM}} gives Monday 3rd August, and {{date:h:mm A}} gives 9:05 AM.

Put text in square brackets to keep it as written: {{date:YYYY-[W]ww}} gives 2026-W32, and {{date:dddd [at] HH:mm}} gives Monday at 09:05. Without the brackets, letters such as the a in “at” are read as codes.

The week number follows Week starts on in Settings, so a note headed “Week 31” is the same week the calendar labels 31. It only differs on Sundays: with a Monday start a Sunday closes the week just gone, and with a Sunday start it opens the week ahead.

A daily note template might be:

# {{date}}

## What happened

## Worth remembering

## Tomorrow

Three empty headings is usually plenty. A template you have to delete half of every morning gets abandoned by Thursday.

Where things go

The folders Pellet uses by default — Inbox, Daily Notes, Templates, Highlights, Attachments — are all changeable in Settings. If you already have a folder structure you like, point Pellet at it rather than reorganizing around the defaults.