EtherPK User Docs

Journal Entries

A journal entry is the document for one calendar day. It is where most writing starts: the thoughts, tasks and links of the day, in the order they happened. Anything that outlives the day gets a page of its own, linked from the entry (Pages And Wikilinks).

There is at most one entry per day, and its date is its whole identity. A journal entry cannot be renamed, and a page cannot be given a date as its name. In a local graph the entry is the file journals/2026-09-21.md.

Open today

  • Select Today's journal at the top of the Graph sidebar, or press Alt+J from anywhere.
  • A new graph opens on today's entry, and Reset workspace returns to it.

Today is worked out at the moment you ask, never cached, so a tab left open overnight opens the new day.

If today has no entry yet, you get a draft: an editable page that becomes the entry on your first keystroke. Opening it and leaving writes nothing.

Any other day

  • The calendar in the Graph sidebar, under today's entry, shows a month with the days that have entries in bold. Select any day to open it; a day with nothing on it opens as a draft. The arrows page by month, and the month's name opens a grid of the year. See The Graph Sidebar.
  • A date link. [[2026-09-21]] in any document links to that day. Quick Find, Search and wikilink completion all offer journal days by their date.
  • A date in the past or the future works the same way. The entry for next Tuesday exists as soon as something links to it or you type into it.

The calendar follows the document you are reading whenever it is a journal entry, so the month on screen is the month being read.

Because a day is a name like any other, linking to it does everything a wikilink does: the day's entry lists the link in its backlinks, and a task nested under [[2026-09-21]] answers to that day in the Tasks view. Two commands in the / menu insert dates without typing them:

  • Today inserts today's date as a link, [[2026-09-21]].
  • Date Picker opens a month grid at the cursor; pick a day and its link is inserted. This grid inserts text and navigates nowhere, unlike the sidebar's calendar.

A date must be a real calendar day to be a journal entry. [[2026-02-30]] is an ordinary page name.

What a journal entry holds

Anything a page can: outliner blocks, prose and headings, tasks, images, code, tables. Two things are different from a page:

  • It has no title: in its frontmatter, because its name is its date. An aliases: list works as on a page.
  • It cannot be protected. Keep anything sensitive on a page and link to it from the day (Protected Documents).

Quick notes move into today's entry as blocks grouped under the day each note was written (Quick Notes).

Journal entries elsewhere