Shortcut to add link to today’s note in Obsidian

In Obsidian, I have set up daily notes with a date format of YYYY/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD . When a date format is defined like this, with /s, it creates the notes in a folder structure following the pattern. So in my case, I have a daily notes folder, followed by folder for each year (2025), then folder for each month (2025-08 ; I use year-month pattern here so that it’s easier to find the unique month’s note) and in those folders, one note 2025-08-28.md for each day.

Whenever I work on projects and keep track of what I’ve done and when, I drop in a [[2025-08-25]] style link. Later, I can open any of my daily notes and from the backlinks section I can find everything that refers to that day. I often have a few dozen of these on active days and less on slower days.

Every time I write one, I have to remember or double check today’s date and that’s a small added friction that I don’t particularly enjoy.

Finally, I did something about it.

First, I created a template Today template with the following:

[[{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}]]

The square brackets are for a backlink and the curly braces include a template variable that formats today’s date in the given YYYY-MM-DD format.

I then installed Vinzent’s Hotkeys for templates community plugin. It allows you to toggle which templates are enabled for hotkeys.

Finally, using the built-in Hotkeys menu, I added an Option + x shortcut for the template. Now, anywhere in Obsidian, I can hit Option + x and get today’s date. Marvellous!

(If you do interstitial journaling, you can define the date pattern in template as a timestamp and make it easy for yourself to add current time.)