silverbullet/website/🔌 Core/Templates.md

The core plug implements a few templating mechanisms.

Page Templates

The {[Template: Instantiate Page]} command enables you to create a new page based on a page template.

Page templates, by default, are looked for in the template/page/ prefix. So creating e.g. a template/page/Meeting Notes page will create a “Meeting Notes” template. You can override this prefix by setting the pageTemplatePrefix in SETTINGS.

Page templates have one “magic” type of page metadata that is used during instantiation:

• $name is used as the default value for a new page based on this template

In addition, any standard template placeholders are available (see below)

For instance:

---
$name: "📕 "
---

# {{@page.name}}
As recorded on {{today}}.

## Introduction
## Notes
## Conclusions

Will prompt you to pick a page name (defaulting to “📕 “), and then create the following page (on 2022-08-08) when you pick “📕 Harry Potter” as a page name:

# 📕 Harry Potter
As recorded on 2022-08-08.

## Introduction
## Notes
## Conclusions

Snippets

$snippets Snippets are similar to page templates, except you insert them into an existing page with the /snippet slash command. The default prefix is snippet/ which is configurable via the snippetPrefix setting in SETTINGS.

Snippet templates do not support the $name page meta, because it doesn’t apply.

However, snippets do support the special |^| placeholder for placing the cursor caret after injecting the snippet. If you leave it out, the cursor will simply be placed at the end, but if you like to insert the cursor elsewhere, that position can be set with the |^| placeholder.

For instance to replicate the /query slash command as a snippet:

<!-- #query |^| -->

<!-- /query -->

Which would insert the cursor right after #query.

Daily Note

The {[Open Daily Note]} command navigates (or creates) a daily note prefixed with a 📅 emoji by default, but this is configurable via the dailyNotePrefix setting in SETTINGS. If you have a page template (see above) named template/page/Daily Note it will use this as a template, otherwise, the page will just be empty (this path is also configurable via the dailyNoteTemplate setting).

Weekly Note

The {[Open Weekly Note]} command navigates (or creates) a weekly note prefixed with a 🗓️ emoji by default, but this is configurable via the weeklyNotePrefix setting in SETTINGS. If you have a page template (see above) named template/page/Weekly Note it will use this as a template, otherwise, the page will just be empty.

Quick Note

The {[Quick Note]} command will navigate to an empty page named with the current date and time prefixed with a 📥 emoji, but this is configurable via the quickNotePrefix in SETTINGS. The use case is to take a quick note outside of your current context.

Template helpers

$vars Currently supported (hardcoded in the code):

• {{today}}: Today’s date in the usual YYYY-MM-DD format
• {{tomorrow}}: Tomorrow’s date in the usual YYY-MM-DD format
• {{yesterday}}: Yesterday’s date in the usual YYY-MM-DD format
• {{lastWeek}}: Current date - 7 days
• {{nextWeek}}: Current date + 7 days
• {{escapeRegexp "hello/there"}} to escape a regexp, useful when injecting e.g. a page name into a query — think name =~ /{{escapeRegexp @page.name}}/ * {{replaceRegexp string regexp replacement}}: replace a regular expression in a string, example use: {{replaceRegexp name "#[^#\d\s\[\]]+\w+" ""}} to remove hashtags from a task name
• {{json @page}} translate any (object) value to JSON, mostly useful for debugging
• {{relativePath @page.name}} translate a path to a relative one (to the current page), useful when injecting page names, e.g. {{relativePath name}}.
• {{substring "my string" 0 3}} performs a substring operation on the first argument, which in this example would result in my
• {{prefixLines "my string\nanother" " "}} prefixes each line (except the first) with the given prefix.
• {{niceDate @page.lastModified}} translates any timestamp into a “nice” format (e.g. 2023-06-20).
• The @page variable contains all page meta data (name, lastModified, contentType, as well as any custom Frontmatter attributes). You can address it like so: {{@page.name}}