# Define a bash command to open a daily notes file

Sun Jan 10 2021

I love taking notes and want to start keeping a separate note per work day. To make it quick to create and open such a note each day, I wanted to create a Bash function today.

I created a template note in which I wanted "TODAY" to be replaced with the current day's date:

# TODAY Planning and Review

## Motivation/Inspiration

## Meetings

## Tasks

## TODO

## TIL (Today I Learned)

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Then I defined a command that:

Stores the directory in which I want to store notes in the NOTES variable.
Formats today's date in the format %Y-%m-%d, e.g. 2020-12-02, and stores it in a variable, TODAY.
Check whether a file with the name TODAY exists in the NOTES directory.
If it does not yet exist, use sed to replace the word "TODAY" in the template file with the current date and output it into a new file called TODAY.
Open the new (or existing) file called TODAY.

today() {
  NOTES="/home/username/daily-notes/"
  TODAY=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
  FILE="$NOTES/$TODAY.md"
  if ! [[ -f "$FILE" ]]; then
    sed  -e "s/TODAY/$TODAY/g" "$NOTES/template.md" > "$FILE"
  fi
  vim "$FILE"
}

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I added to function to my /.zshrc file so that I can run today from anywhere in my terminal.