Template with Today's Date as Title

[anon74780586]

I know this has been asked before, I think the “Actions” addition in 11.x is the key, but I’m not quite able to figure it out. Hoping for a little community guidance

I’m a long-time Noteplan user, who has recently made the switch to Agenda. Being a technical sales guy who absolutely LIVES in meetings, the date-driven nature of Agenda is a game changer for me.

There is one part of my Noteplan workflow that isn’t exactly native to Agenda, but I believe I have a work around. I loved the “daily” note that existed in Noteplan for each day. It was a bit of a blank canvas, tied only to the date. I used that note every morning as a journal/scratch pad of sorts. I’d quick type out my focus for the day, thoughts/feelings, a rough outline of things I needed to accomplish, etc.

To duplicate this in Agenda, I’ve created a project called “Daily Planner”. Each morning (or the night before if I’m being proactive) I create a new note by clicking on the day and clicking “New Note on This Day”. That will create a new note in that “Daily Planner” project, with the title of the note being the date (Oct 12, 2020). Simple, and fixes that little void I miss from Noteplan.

Today, I had some free time and started to think about a more “structured” daily note. A template, I thought! That would be perfect. So, I created a template with some structure and saved it as “Daily Template”. I can now click on the date, and click “New Note From Template”, choose my template and BOOM…oh…wait…my title isn’t right.

My template is there, but the title of the note is “Untitled Template”. Okay. Not great. I wanted the title of the note to be the date. I feel like that’s something you should be able to do with “actions” but I’ve spent like 15 minutes messing around and I still can’t figure out how to get my title right.

Anyone have any guidance on this one. I’m not completely picky about the format. I just wanted the title of that note each day to clearly show the date I tied the note to as the title. I know that someone said this should be possible with Actions but I can’t seem to figure it out.

[mekentosj]

Yes, this is indeed possible with actions and templates.

The trick is to create a template where you use the \date action in the title like this:

If you like you can further tweak the exact format of the date as described here:

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Template Placeholders and Text Actions Text Actions in Agenda allows you to type short commands that upon completion get dynamically converted and expanded into plain text. Think about it as a quick way to trigger an action like typing \remind to insert a reminder or \date to insert the current date. Text Actions work in both normal notes and templates. In addition, Agenda also supports a set of template-specific Text Actions, a kind of special placeholders in your templates that get replaced …

Also, note that you can give the template a custom name by double-clicking the entry in the template list on the left:

This will then be the name you see in the list when holding the plus button, or in your case, when clicking a day header in the inspector:

Hope that helps!

[anon74780586]

That makes complete sense. That is exactly what I was wanting to do…except…I don’t have the title of the note in my template? See the screenshot… I just opened the templates manager and created a new one. I tried creating one from an existing note…same issue. No title bar at the top of my note.

[mekentosj]

That’s odd, does it make a difference if you turn the app into light mode? And are you using version 11.1?

[anon74780586]

11.1 (151)

Kicking it to light mode brought the titles back. And kicking it back to dark mode kept them. I’d chalk that up as a really weird bug or something. I should be set with my templates. Thank you for the help. Sorry to cause a hassle!

[mekentosj]

Thanks for confirming, I think I know where this comes from.

[mekentosj]

Update: We believe this issue should be fixed in the version 11.1 update, please let us know if this is not the case.

[Jander]

I’ve experienced the missing title field in Agenda 12.0.2 (181) on macOS. Your hint to manually switch between dark and light mode helped to get the template’s title back and editable. Usually I enable the option so that dark and light mode is adopted from the OS. So it could be, that there is still a minor bug when automatically switching between modes is active.

[mekentosj]

Ok, we’ll have a look, thanks for pointing it out.

[fspinheiro]

Same issue, using Agenda 13.1.1 (195), had to switch to Light to make titles appear.

[robbie07]

Hi,

Noticed that missing title too. Resizing the window also works.

Rob

[Javier81]

Help. I’ve tried looking for template examples on the forum. Unfortunately I have not been able to. Could you share some of them please?

[mekentosj]

We don’t have dedicated example templates but perhaps you have missed the How To on templates: Creating and Using Templates ?

[Javier81]

Thank you. I see on the screenshots several templates. Would it be possible to share these?

[sgtaylor]

That’s still a bug in Agenda (newest version as of today). Oftentimes when the device (either iOS or Mac) switches from light to dark I go back to Agenda and everything looks like it’s missing. When I refresh the note, then I can see everything.

[Javier81]

Not having a Template gallery is a MAYOR disadvantage. Do explore generating a Template gallery. Notion, Obsidian, and even Craft have them.

[mekentosj]

We’ll think about it, thanks for the suggestion!