Press ⌘T and you're writing in today's note — created if it's new, opened if it
already exists. That's the whole habit. Prefer to choose a template first? Click the ☼
Today toolbar button instead and a picker opens — see Start from a template.
2026-06-11, June 11, 2026, or your own pattern.daily, and automatic filing in a Daily Notes folder,
so the journal exports in order.⌃⌘[ / ⌃⌘]) to walk the journal.By default a daily note is just the date and a blank line to write on. To turn it into a journal, choose a daily note template in Settings ▸ Journal ▸ Daily notes:
Every ⌘T then opens that structure instantly, with the caret already waiting in
the first prompt. Want to choose by hand — a Planner on a busy day, say? Click the ☼
Today button (rather than pressing ⌘T) and a picker offers all of them — the
built-in starters, your own named templates, and a ＋ New template… option —
with your default pre-selected. The same picker lives on Go ▸ New Daily Note from
Template… and in the ⇧⌘P command palette. It only changes that one day; your
default is untouched. Blank in the picker always means just the date.
Already opened today's note? Say you pressed ⌘T this morning, then made or
changed a template and want today to use it. Until you write in today's note — while it holds
only its date, or only what a template put there — the button and Go ▸ New Daily Note from
Template… open the picker and fill that note with the template you choose, and you can
choose again if you picked the wrong one. Once you have written anything in it — a word, a
picture, a box you added or checked — they just open it, and the status line says why: a
template never writes over your words.
Want your own? Run Go ▸ New Journal Template… (or choose ＋ New template… in the ☼
Today picker), give it a name, and MojoPad creates a Template: <name> page — seeded from a
built-in, in your wiki's own format, so a Markdown wiki gets a Markdown template — for you to edit.
Make as many as you like, named however you wish; they appear in the ☼ Today picker and in the
New Page picker (⌘N), so one set of templates works everywhere (the one named Daily is
kept for days). Name one Daily and set Settings ▸ Journal ▸ Daily notes ▸ Daily note template
to Custom to make it your ⌘T default. If Settings ask for Custom and there is no
Template: Daily page, the day starts with just its date and the status line says so.
What a day takes from its template is what a page made with ⌘N takes: its words and
their formatting — a Markdown template's headings, bold, checkboxes and links arrive as
headings, bold, checkboxes and links — its format, its tags, its page type, the
values of its properties, and how it is shown: its reading width, what it
exports as, and which properties show at the top of the page. Tag your Daily template
journal and every day made from it is tagged journal too. Two things stay
with the template: Skip on export, so you can keep the template out of an export and still
export your days, and Outline Editing — turning it on for your Daily template does not
turn it on for your days.
Templates expand date/time variables and can include scriptlets and placeholders — see Templates and Placeholders:
{{date}} · {{time}} · {{timeDate}} — expand to the moment the note is created
<#what's on deck#> — a placeholder, pre-selected and ready to type over
Templates written the older way, with $date$, still work — including one
you converted to Markdown, where the dollars are kept from being read as a formula.
The Calendar palette shows the month at a glance: a dot marks every day that has a note, today is circled, and ‹ › walk the months (click the month name to snap back to today). Click any day to open its note — or to start one, even for a past date.
"Today" is computed in the time zone you set in Settings ▸ Dates & Time — keep your home time zone while traveling and the journal won't fork at midnight.
If a page named Event: Daily Note exists, its script runs whenever a daily note is created — stamp it, tag it, drop in the headings you always write, pull a figure from another page. See Scripting: Event Pages.
Only run scripts in a document you trust. A script can read every page in your wiki, and it can reach the web — the same way the clipper does, through the parts of MojoPad that fetch a page or a picture for you. Those two facts together are why the question is asked once per document and why the answer should be no for anything that arrived from somebody else. A script you wrote in a wiki you keep is a different thing from a script that came with a document in your inbox, and MojoPad cannot tell them apart for you.