Daily notes
A daily note is a single dated note per day — created on demand — that gives you one obvious place to journal, log your work, and capture stray thoughts before filing them anywhere.
Daily notes remove the hardest part of note-taking: deciding where a thought goes. Today already has a home. Open it, write, and sort later — or never.
Open today's note
Open today
Open the daily note from the sidebar or the command palette. If today's note doesn't exist yet, Altretta creates it — named by the date.
Capture freely
Jot meeting notes, a journal entry, tasks, links, half-formed ideas. It's a normal Markdown note, so wikilinks, tags, embeds, and properties all work.
Link out as you go
Reference other notes with [[wikilinks]] so today's capture connects into the rest of your vault. Backlinks make those mentions resurface later on the notes you linked to.
Periodic notes: weekly through yearly
Daily isn't the only cadence. Altretta gives you periodic notes at five granularities — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly — each created on demand and named by its period. A daily note captures what happened today; the wider periods are where you step back and connect the days together. Each granularity has its own folder, filename format and template.
Only daily notes are on out of the box. Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly each ship disabled — turn on the ones you'll actually use in Settings → Editor & vault → Periodic notes, rather than accumulating four cadences you never open.
Once a granularity is on, you also get commands to step to the previous and next period, and to roll a period up — a way to gather what happened across its days into the period note. None of them ship with a key binding; run them from the command palette, or assign one in Settings → Shortcuts.
Random and unique notes
Two more ways to move through and into your vault:
- Random note — jump to a random note in your vault. It's a surprisingly good rediscovery tool: resurface something you wrote months ago, spot a note that needs linking, or break out of always visiting the same handful of files.
- Unique note (Zettel) — create a quick-capture note with a guaranteed-unique name (typically a timestamp), so you can write down an idea right now without stopping to name or file it. It's the frictionless entry point for the Zettelkasten style: capture first, connect with links and backlinks later.
Start every day from a template
Daily notes can be templated, so each new day starts with the same scaffold — a journaling prompt, a tasks section, a log heading — with the date filled in automatically. Set the template once and every daily note is consistent.
Daily notes pair naturally with capture-then-file: dump everything into today, then link or move the keepers into their proper notes when you have a moment. Nothing is lost in the meantime, and your signed history records the trail.
Related
Organizing your vault
The overview: files, search, bookmarks, templates, Bases, and Maps & Manuals.
Templates
Design the scaffold each period's note opens with.
Bookmarks
Keep today's note one tap away.
Backlinks & unlinked mentions
The captures you link from a daily note resurface on the notes you mention.
Glossary
Daily note, periodic note, Zettelkasten, unique note — defined.