Daily notes and journaling in Plainva
The note I open most isn’t a project or a wiki page. It’s today. A running log, half journal half scratchpad, and I open it so often that any friction in getting there was going to bother me every single day — so I made sure there wasn’t any. Open today’s note and start typing; if it doesn’t exist yet, Plainva just creates it, in whatever folder and date format you’ve set, starting from a template if you want one, so every day has the same shape instead of a blank page each morning.
A calendar that knows where you are
This was the detail I cared about most. The sidebar calendar highlights the daily note you actually have open, not just “today,” and jumps to its month on its own, so paging back through a month of entries is a click, not a hunt. Optional ISO week numbers and a month/year picker earn their keep once the journal gets long — and it gets long faster than you’d think.
None of this is a special “journal mode,” and that’s the point. A daily note is just a Markdown file, so everything else in Plainva already works on it: link a day to a project, pull a month of entries into a .base and see them as a table, search across a year of days instantly. It never turns into a locked-in feed, just a folder of files that stay yours. If you’d rather start than assemble all this yourself, the built-in Journal vault template sets up the folder, the date format, a daily template and a .base view in one go, and you can be writing your first entry a minute later.
- More: getting started
- Try it: plainva.com
— Marco