Hey r/ObsidianMD,

Long time vault tinkerer here. I kept dating notes by hand, and I wanted it to happen automatically without configuring anything. So I built AutoDater.

What it does

- Adds Created when you make a note

- Updates Updated whenever you edit it

- Writes both into frontmatter, so the dates live inside the note and travel with it

Let me get ahead of the obvious objection: yes, this has been done before.

That is true, and honestly it is a good sign. It means the need is real. If Linter or Update time on edit already do what you want, keep them. I built the version I wished existed, and it is a different set of tradeoffs:

- Single purpose. One job, done well. Not a giant rules engine you have to learn.

- Zero setup. Install, enable, done. No templates, no per-note frontmatter, no config file.

- Created is written once and never overwritten. Only Updated moves.

- The dates are stored in the note, not read from the filesystem, so they sync, survive, and work with Dataview and Bases.

- Works on mobile.

- Small things: exclude folders like Templates, rename the properties, and set a custom format like DD/MM/YYYY HH:mm:ss.

Who it is for: people who want it to just work, and who do not want to read a wiki to get automatic dates.

It is free, open source (GPL), passed Obsidian's automated review, and already has 1k downloads.

Get it: https://obsidian.md/plugins?id=autodater

You can also search AutoDater in Settings > Community plugins > Browse.

I am the author, so I am biased, but I do want feedback. If something is missing or annoying, tell me and I will look at it.

I moved to Obsidian from Notepad months ago. I have this one really long note that I have been slowly adding stuff to for the past few months. Sometimes I would accidentally trigger an unknown keyboard shortcut or glitch that would randomly cut off and move sentences around in the bottom part of the note. The CTRL + Z shortcut does not work. It can only be undone by manually putting the sentences back to their original places based on memory or going to the version history and restoring the best version. Today, I finally decided to scroll through this note. As I was slowly reading from the bottom to the top, I realized that a lot of the old sentences were cut off. I immediately went to the note's version history, but the oldest version was from a couple days ago. I then checked the snapshot in file recovery section, but the oldest snapshot was from only 7 days ago. There's no way to recover all those notes now. It difficult to notice that the shortcut/glitch also affected other parts of the note. By the way, I have zero community plugins. And fortunately, this bullsh+t only happened to this note. Otherwise, I would not only be distraught right now, but also absolutely devastated.

Wall of text warning: TLDR I vibe coded my own dream reader/note app for Boox that take my notes into an .md directly in Obsidian.

First of all I'm nothing like a developer, I'm just a computer person that recently bought his own domain to host their very own apps/tools, this is nothing like an add. This reader is only for me but I'm really proud of how it's going and I'm happy sharing the process. I own a Boox Air Not 4c and Neoreader and the notes apps are just really good apps, the best ones I ever tried I would say. But after two years of owning my Boox there were some little things here and there that made the experience just not cohesive enough for me.

I tried a lot in this note taking rabbit hole, I'm an obsidian person and had my vault since years ago, but the process of reading and typing notes it's not for me, I like my notes handwritten, but also like reviewing them in obsidian, so I had to take notes and the type them apart if I wanted the perfect note taking environment for me. So no, I last 2 months or so doing that, because it was just so tedious.

This year I made some tools with AI for myself, an ERP, some games and recently an blog/personal webpage where I share some of my Book library and how is connected in an obsidian Graph and thought, I can take this to another level.

I made an app subdomain to host my tools and start with the simple idea of making me a way to read books and publish the notes directly in my webpage graph directly from the cloud server I host the web on. And since that Idea came to my mind I'm locked in my desk making my dream app and enjoying every bit of it like I'm kid with a new shiny toy.

I always wanted to have the same "analog" experience of having a book and a notebook just there in my desktop and seamlessly swap between them, that experience that I could never had nor with my Boox, nor with my iPad, my cellphone nor my laptop, but the digital benefits overall are just far superior for my workflow so I gave up on that feeling.

I worked in Lector (which just means reader in spanish) with that philosophy in mind. So It have 3 different "spaces", the book at the very top, the desk where you tinker your quotes, write down, and paste notes on your book, and the notebook at the bottom where you can hand write and when you return to your desk all the handwritten notes are transcribed into markdown.

Everything in Lector is a markdown behind an pretty interface and a pdf/epub reader, all the quotes, the bookmarks, the highlights are meant to be in a .md file that I sync trough my cloud server to all my devices not to only have them in Lector, but to review all my books in Obsidian.

Nothing in lector uses AI of any kind, I only use Claude to make the app, but it does cost nothing but the server subscription to maintain the reader and the workflow available in all my devices.

If you have suggestions of any kinds, I will be really happy to read you, hope you enjoyed and sorry for the slop images but It was too much work to just explain all the features without a visual support.