Daily notes, reviews, and the calendar

Daily notes

Run Deckard: Create Daily Note, press Cmd+Shift+Alt+D (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D on Windows and Linux), or use the button in the Context view. Deckard creates or opens a note named with the local date, such as 2026-08-30.md.

• Deckard: Open Previous Daily Note and Deckard: Open Next Daily Note step to the nearest daily note before or after the current one. From another note they start from today.
• Find opens the daily note for a day typed in plain words, such as last friday or 2026-10-02, when you type only a day; a missing note is created from the template.
• Deckard: Open Weekly Note and Deckard: Open Monthly Note create or open week-2026-09-13-2026-09-19.md and month-september-2026.md. A week runs Sunday to Saturday, or from the day deckard.calendar.weekStart names.
• A new note starts from its template.
• Add Task (Cmd+Shift+Alt+N) with no note open writes into today’s note, creating it if needed, and its title names the note before anything is written.
• Older names, 2026-W38.md and 2026-09.md, are still read and opened for their period.
• Where they go. New daily, weekly, and monthly notes are written at the top of the notes folder, or in deckard.periodicNotes.folder inside it, such as journal/{yyyy} for a folder a year ({mm} is the month). A note already written elsewhere is still found for its day.
• Whose clock. Days and times are those of the machine Deckard runs on: over Remote-SSH or in a Codespace, the remote’s time zone, so a remote set to UTC starts a new day at UTC midnight. The / menu’s Time (UTC) writes the time in UTC for a log such as an incident timeline, beside Time for the machine’s own.

Templates

A new daily, weekly, or monthly note starts from a file in the templates folder (deckard.templatesFolder, templates unless you change it), when it is there:

• In a template, {date} becomes the period’s first day, as 2026-09-13; {week} the days the week holds, as 2026-09-13 to 2026-09-19; and {month} the month, as September 2026. Any of the three works in any template.
• The file is read each time a note is made, so a change to it reaches the next note. A note that already exists is never rewritten.
• The templates folder is not indexed, and New Note from Template lists these files too. With the setting empty there are no templates, and each note starts from the line in the last column.

Writing a review

Deckard: Open Weekly Note and Deckard: Open Monthly Note write a review into a note they create. Deckard: Write a Review writes or updates one for the current note’s period, or one you pick.

• A summary line sits under the heading: Done: 12 (8/11 done (73%) of those due) · Still open: 5 · Coming up: 9 · …
• deckard.periodicNote.reviewSections adds your own sections, each a title and a search: [{ "title": "Waiting on others", "query": "is:waiting" }]. Each lists up to 20 results. A search that does not parse says so in its section.
• It is plain Markdown with [[links]], headed Review of 2026-09-13 to 2026-09-19, between <!-- deckard:review --> and <!-- deckard:review:end -->. Running it again rewrites only that part. Deckard offers Open and Undo.
• It adds no tags: titles are written without tags, and new tags are listed in a fenced block.
• deckard.periodicNote.review turns off the review in newly created notes. The command still writes one.

Carrying unfinished tasks forward

deckard.dailyNote.rollover sets what a newly created daily note does with earlier unfinished tasks:

• Tasks come from every earlier daily note, oldest first, within the last week. Other notes are left alone.
• Tasks are written exactly as they were, in order, under a Carried over heading at the end of today’s note, one level below its first heading (## Carried over under # {date}). A second rollover adds to it.
• Steps travel with their task. move takes everything under the task; migrate copies its open steps and marks each line it leaves. A step whose task is not carried comes forward on its own at the top level.
• A [>] line is not a task, so it stops counting as open, and its link gives today’s note a backlink.
• A task is carried only if its line is unchanged since indexing and not already in today’s note. In migrate mode, a task in several notes is carried once, from the newest. Only a note Deckard creates rolls tasks in.
• Deckard: Roll Unfinished Tasks Forward does it on demand, whatever the setting, creating today’s note if needed. It moves tasks unless the setting is migrate or copy.
• The rollover is one write, with Open and Undo afterward. Deckard: Undo Last Change also undoes it. Its notes go back together or not at all: if one changed since, Undo puts nothing back and names that note.

Promises in today’s note

Much of what you wait on is a sentence, not a task: @sam-okafor says the loader retry fix lands by Friday. In today’s daily note, a line that names one person and a day to come is a promise you can track:

• Its day words get a faint wavy underline, and a lens above it offers Track: Sam · Fri, Oct 16 and Not a promise. The lightbulb offers Track as waiting on Sam, due Fri, Oct 16, Track as waiting on Sam…, which opens the task editor first, to change the day or the words, and Not a promise.
• Track writes a waiting task under the line, as a child list item, so it travels with the sentence: ` - [w] Loader retry fix lands 📅 2026-10-16 👤 @sam-okafor. Its status is the first on-hold [status](/tasks.html#task-statuses) you have (Waiting, [w], unless you changed them), and its metadata is written in your format, or in Dataview's brackets when the note's tasks use them. Undo takes it back. From then on it is an ordinary task: on the board, found by is:waiting`, under Sam owes you on Sam’s Between you card, and overdue when the day passes.
• The title is the words after the person and says, said, will, promised, or to, without the day, a leading that or the, or the closing punctuation: Loader retry fix lands. When that leaves fewer than two words, it is the whole line without the day.
• The person is one @name or #person/… tag, and not you (deckard.me). A line naming two people, or only you, is no promise.
• The day is after today and no more than 60 days off: by Friday, on Friday, Friday, on fri, tomorrow, next week and end of week or EOW (that week’s Friday), end of month or EOM, on the 20th, Oct 20, 20 Oct, 10/20 (read in your date format’s order), 2026-10-20, or in 3 days. Of two days on a line, the last is the promise’s.
• A task, a question (- [?] …, or a line ending in ?), a heading, and code are never promises, and a line with a task under it assigned to the same person, done or not, is already tracked.
• Not a promise is remembered for that line, by its words, in VS Code’s storage for the workspace. Change the words and it is offered again.
• Only today’s note is read, while you write in it; older notes are left alone. deckard.editor.trackPromises turns the underline, the lens, and the lightbulb off; it follows the editor preset while unset, on in Full and Tasks. The lens follows VS Code’s own editor.codeLens. The underline’s color is deckard.promiseUnderline in workbench.colorCustomizations.

Calendar

The Calendar view in the Deckard sidebar shows a month of whole weeks, Sunday to Saturday unless deckard.calendar.weekStart or your display language starts them on Monday. Each day shows its date, a dot for a daily note, a count of open tasks due (orange once past, muted once more than 30 days gone), and, outlined, open tasks scheduled (⏳) that day. In a new install it starts collapsed; expand it, or drag it where you like.

Select a day, the mark beside a week, or the month’s name to open its note; Deckard offers to create a missing one. The arrows step through months; Today returns.

Repeats. A repeating task shows a muted ↻ on every later date its rule lands on in the visible weeks, and a Repeats group in the calendar page’s day panel. These dates are not written; a row opens the task. A when done rule shows only its next date.

Weekends. Show weekends, in the calendar page’s ⋯, shows all seven days; clear it for five working days, on the page and in the Calendar view alike.

The calendar page. Deckard: Open Calendar, Calendar at the top of the Context view, or the button in the Calendar view’s title bar, opens the calendar as a page. Each day lists its tasks by name: due, then scheduled (⏳), then repeats (↻, dashed), with +3 more. Click a day to choose it; its panel sits beside or under the month, or in the Context sidebar while that is open. Double-click a day, or press Enter on it, to open its note. The panel shows:

• the day’s name, such as Friday, September 25 · Today, and its daily note, Open or Create;
• tasks due, then scheduled, five of each with Show 7 more, each with a checkbox and a Tomorrow button (Next day after tomorrow) that moves its date, with Undo, shown on the row under the pointer or with focus;
• tasks done that day, folded; uncheck to reopen;
• notes created that day, apart from daily, weekly, and monthly notes. After five, Search all 14 opens created = 2026-09-25.

On the page:

• The top right reads ‹ Today ›, **Month

  Week, and **⋯: the arrows step, Today returns, and Month and Week switch layouts. ⋯ holds Show weekends, Theme… and Zen, Help on this page, and Keyboard shortcuts.

• Drag a due or scheduled task to another day to move its date. Repeats stay put.
• Keys: [ and ] step, t returns to today, m and w switch the layout, ? lists the keys.

Tasks in your calendar app

Deckard can write your dated tasks to a calendar file (.ics) that Apple Calendar, Outlook, Google Calendar, and most other calendar apps read. Each task is an all-day event on its due date, or on its scheduled date when it has none, and its notes link back to the task’s line in VS Code. Nothing leaves your machine: the file is written where you say, and your calendar app reads it from there.

• Once: run Deckard: Export Tasks as Calendar…, choose where to save it, and import the file into your calendar app.
• Kept up to date: set deckard.calendar.exportFile to a path ending in .ics, such as .deckard/tasks.ics in the first workspace folder, ~/Calendars/tasks.ics, or an absolute path, or choose Keep It Up to Date after an export. Deckard rewrites it a moment after your notes change, once the first scan has read them, and only when the calendar changed. It never writes over a file that is not a calendar, and a relative path cannot climb out of the folder. Apple Calendar can subscribe to the file (File → New Calendar Subscription… with its file:// address) and follow your notes; Google Calendar subscribes only to web addresses, so import the file there instead. A file inside your notes is not indexed; add it to .gitignore if the folder is a repository.
• Which tasks: deckard.calendar.exportQuery is the search the file lists, every open task by default. is:open is:mine keeps it to yours, and #project/atlas is:open to one project. A done task the search finds is marked ✓.
• Moving a task’s date moves its event rather than making a new one; a repeating task is an event on its next date.

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