Tips and Tricks

Create a short alias

Typing obsidian-logging for every quick note gets old fast. Add a short alias to your shell config:

alias q=' obsidian-logging'

The leading space keeps the invocation itself out of your shell history in most shells. On Windows, use doskey:

doskey q=obsidian-logging

Pipe command output straight into your journal

git log -1 --oneline | obsidian-logging -S -c work
uptime | obsidian-logging -S -c health

Quickly check in without leaving the terminal

q -p standup -c work
q -p gym -c health

Review the day

q -l -c all -T table -H

Lists every category for today as a markdown table with headers — a good end-of-day review command.

Script a weekly summary

Because -b accepts any number of days, you can loop back over the past week in a shell script and pull every day’s entries for a given category, e.g. to build a weekly report:

for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6; do
  obsidian-logging -b "$i" -l -c work
done

Keep the automatic seconds-migration in mind

Adding a new entry to a log section rewrites every existing timestamp in that section to include seconds, if any are missing them. If you hand-edit timestamps in a daily note, adding a new entry afterward will normalize them — this is expected and documented in List Type and Time Format.