Feature Request: Simple Journal Template Transformation?

[pankajgarkoti]

Issues

• I have checked existing issues and there are no existing ones with the same request.

Feature description

I have a journal template that I use daily, and I would like to streamline the process of creating new journal entries by automatically transferring tasks from the previous day.

Current Template

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*DDDD DDDD-MM-YY*

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* Tasks
    - ( ) Task 1
    - ( ) Task 2
* Logs
    > Logs of the day
    - HH:mm:ss describe what you're doing
* Notes
    > Any additional notes
* /Template Version: YYYY-MM-DD/

Entry for 2024-09-24

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*Tuesday 2024-09-24*
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* Tasks
    - ( ) world domination
    - (x) grocery shopping
* Logs
    > Logs of the day
    - HH:mm:ss describe what you're doing
* Notes
    > Any additional notes
* /Template Version: 2024-09-24/

Entry for 2024-09-25

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*Wednesday 2024-09-25*
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* Tasks
    - ( ) world domination # Automatically transferred from the previous day #
* Logs
    > Logs of the day
    - HH:mm:ss describe what you're doing
* Notes
    > Any additional notes
* /Template Version: 2024-09-24/

Want

As shown in the examples, I want to:

• Automatically transfer the unfinished tasks from the previous day's entry to the current day's entry.
• Additionally add any more arbitrary transformations I can define. Such as adding dates automatically and so on.

Implementation Suggestion

• Provide an option to include a callback function that replaces placeholders in the template. The output from this callback function could populate the new buffer.
• The callback function may receive the previous day's entry and the template as arguments - and return the entire text content of the new entry. This is the most general and non-invasive solution I think. The default behaviour would be a function that just returns the template and does nothing to it.

---

Is this already possible in Neorg? If not, would this be a feature the community is interested in? Otherwise, I plan to implement it as a macro in my configuration.

Help

Yes, but I don't know how to start. I would need guidance

Implementation help

• Just a good discussion and some pointers to the right files.

[benlubas]

The general idea of dynamic templates for your journal is covered in a external module neorg-templates which I highly recommend. And implementing some sort of task carryover would be best done in that plugin I think.

I attempted a "task carryover" feature myself dots. Unfortunately, the way I wanted to do this with Treesitter is inconsistent b/c of a bug in the TS parser that prevented matching something that looked like this:

** heading with a specific name

  - ( ) tasks after a blank line

As far as implementation details, you could search for all todo items very easily with just a single TS query if you don't care about what heading they're under, then you could just return them from a function that you turn into a snippet node in neorg-templates.

You could then contribute that function to neorg-templates, or just keep it for yourself and share it in a discussion in the neorg-templates repo.