Say whaaaattt??
Yep. What started as a git branch with a couple new features has evolved quite a bit, and I've been slowly chipping away at the new Calendar version for quite a while. So I'm excited to share it's progress.
What's new?
Quite a bit.
For starters, the calendar comes with a bunch of new "sources." A source can be just about anything you want. Originally, the calendar just was a tool for journaling. The dots on each day gave you a rough estimate for how much you've written that day. But I wanted v2 to be a lot more flexible. Whether you use your daily notes as a hub for links, as a task list, or maybe not at all and all your notes are scattered about in zettels, the calendar should still fit into your workflow.
By default, the plugin comes with the following sources:
Words: show the word count of your daily note
Tasks: pending/completed tasks on the daily note
Links: outbound links on the daily note
Backlinks: number of backlinks pointing to that daily note
Zettels: number of notes prefixed with YYYYMMDD related to a particular day
Each source has its own configuration and you can turn them on/off depending on your workflow.
Information Overload
The biggest challenge with showing all these new sources was figuring out where to put them. The calendar should be compact and not a visual mess.
Introducing...
β¨ NEW Overflow Menu
You'll be able to configure what sources appear on the calendar face itself and what appears in the overflow menu. The overflow menu appears on hover so you can quickly scan through all your daily note metadata and get a more complete picture of your day, week, and month.
Keep it simple, keep it pretty
With configurable sources and an extremely flexible interface, I wanted to make it easy for users to keep the calendar looking pretty (and more importantly: harder to make it look ugly π).
To avoid everyone scrabbling to find their favorite hex color codes and manually color-picking for each source, I built a magic colorpicker. The colorpicker will try to present you with a color palette matching your current theme.
And it doesn't look too shabby on mobile if you ask me:
π¦ Everything else
There's a lot more changes under the hood:
Calendar Sources API: There is an API for adding new sources. So if you're a developer interested in adding additional your own source to the list, you can with only a few lines of code!
Faster: Even with all the new features, the calendar should feel quite a bit faster this version. I've rewritten how the metadata is cached so files should only be reparsed when they need to be.
Drag-and-Drop: Drag any date from the calendar to drop a link to that note. Or drag it to a pane title bar to open that note in a given split.
Monthly Notes: If you use the Periodic Notes plugin, you've probably been annoyed that you can't view monthly notes from the Calendar. (Isn't that plugin written by the SAME GUY??) Well, I appreciate your patience and now you can open monthly notes by clicking on the name of the month.
Toggle Week number command: There's a new command for quickly toggling the week number on/off in case you want a compact sidebar but quick access to your weekly notes.
Show more tasks: The calendar is no longer limited to just showing 1 dot for your daily TODOs. Set the max number of dots displayed so you can see how much you have left to do at a quick glance.
What's next?
I'm looking for early feedback before rolling the changes out to all users. If you'd like to try it out, there are installation instructions on Github.