Templater 101 with Sam Morrison

Templater’s real value isn’t just generating note templates—it’s acting like a JavaScript-powered automation layer inside Obsidian, letting users run code that reads vault data, writes back to notes, and even calls external APIs. Sam Morrison, a long-time contributor and current maintainer of the Templater plugin, walks through practical examples that turn “daily notes” into dynamic workflows: auto-inserting dates, linking to adjacent daily notes, pulling random vault entries, and maintaining structured logs with timestamps.

The walkthrough starts with the simplest pattern: a daily note template that uses Templater commands to insert today’s date and greet the user. From there, it scales into more useful daily-note behaviors—adding links to yesterday and tomorrow, and embedding a link to a randomly selected note from the vault. Morrison highlights a key usability feature: Templater provides autocomplete for available commands, and the documentation is generated from the same source as the autocomplete, making it easier to discover what’s possible without guessing.

A common snag appears when users click “tomorrow” or “yesterday” links: the navigation can create blank notes instead of triggering the daily-note logic. Morrison’s fix is to use “folder templates” so that when a note is created inside the daily folder, Templater automatically applies the correct daily template. He also shows how to avoid date drift by using Templater’s date functions with offsets and by deriving the “current” date from the title of the note itself (via the file title), so the logic stays consistent even when editing past or future daily notes.

The session then moves one level deeper with a running log system. Morrison demonstrates how to prompt the user for text (using a modal prompt), timestamp the entry, locate the correct daily note file through Obsidian’s API (via the note’s T-file), and append the new entry under a “log” header. He emphasizes a practical engineering point: Templater code often involves asynchronous operations, and missing “await” can cause actions to run out of order—leading to broken workflows. Error handling also matters; when a daily note can’t be found, Templater can trigger notices so users don’t have to hunt through consoles.

Beyond daily notes, Morrison shows Templater as a general workflow engine. A demo “IMDb” template uses an external API to create a new “watched” record note for a selected title, then later updates that note with ratings and reviews. The same approach can be used to prototype plugin-like behavior: once a workflow is working as a Templater command/template, it can later be migrated into a full plugin if deeper lifecycle features are needed.

In the second half, Morrison shifts from code to community contribution. He argues that maintaining popular Obsidian plugins often depends more on reproducible bug reports, troubleshooting, documentation improvements, and answering user questions than on writing code. He describes a “needs repro” issue label and notes that cross-platform differences (especially Windows users when maintainers don’t own Windows machines) make reproduction and detailed reports crucial. Looking ahead, Morrison says his near-term focus is stabilizing Templater—particularly around sync conflicts between desktop and mobile—and delivering safer incremental improvements, including low-hanging documentation wins and careful PR review.