Today

One page for what the day asks of you: a line to capture, today's note, the sigils due, the cards due, the tasks whose date has come, what you wrote on this day in earlier years — and, in the evening, one question.

Today gathers what four pages already keep — the daily note, the Sigils page's checklist, the Orbits shelf's due counts and your tasks — so a morning starts in one place. It stores nothing of its own: every row is read from your notes, and every tick is written back into them through the same door the page it came from uses.

Open it from the first door in the top bar (a sun half over the horizon), with Ctrl/Cmd Alt Shift D, or by typing Open Today in the command palette. It opens as a tab in the pane you are in, like the Calendar, and its address is /today. On a phone it is the first tab of the bottom bar and the screen the app opens on. To open it every time Astrolabe starts, choose The Today page under Settings → Writing → Open on launch (the session you left is restored underneath it).

The chord is the third verb of one idea: Ctrl/Cmd Alt D opens today's note, Ctrl/Cmd Shift D drops a line into it without leaving where you are, and both modifiers together open the page that holds it — see the keymap.

What is on the page, top to bottom

• The capture line. Type and press Enter: the line lands under ## Captured in today's note, stamped with the time, exactly as the capture sheet files it (the note is created from its template first if it is not there yet). When this device can record and your vault keeps recordings, a microphone beside it opens the voice note recorder.
• Today's note, rendered. The note is drawn read-only, as the reading view draws it, with an Open button that puts it in a pane where you can edit it — or Start it when today has no note yet. A dashboard with a second editor inside it would be two editors for one file racing each other's saves; this is one editor, one button away.
• Sigils. Every task a sigil asks of today, ticked in place. A tick is the Sigil card's own edit, so the log line it writes is the one the card would have written. A course's day and a book's pages are answered on the card, where the steps and the page count are: those rows open the Sigils page.
• Orbits. Each deck with cards due today, with its count and Study, which starts the session.
• Tasks due. Every open task whose 📅 date is today or has passed, overdue ones first and marked in red — the same list the Sigils page's Due by today shows. Ticking one writes the box in its note ([x] and a ✅ date), and the row stays struck through until the page next reads the vault.
• On this day. Notes written on this month-day in earlier years, with how long ago and their opening lines, and trackers finished on it. A note's day is its daily-note date when it is one, else its date: (or created:, published:), else the day Astrolabe first saw the file.
• Recently read. The notes you were last in.

When no sigil, card or task is due, the page says so in one line rather than showing three empty headings.

The evening question

From six in the evening, a line appears under today's note: How did the day go? Write a line or two and press Enter (or Keep it). The answer goes into today's note under a ## Reflection heading:

## Reflection

Slow start; the chapter on cities finally moved.

• If your daily template already has an empty ## Reflection section, the answer goes into it — there is never a second heading. A second answer the same evening joins the first under the same heading.
• If today's note is open in an editor, the text is written through that editor, so Ctrl/Cmd Z takes it back.
• Once the section has something in it, Today shows it back to you as The day, in your words — the next morning too, until the day turns.

The heading is English in every language on purpose, like ## Captured: it is an address inside the note that a template, a query or a search can find, not a label for the eye.

On a phone

The phone's Today is the same page in the phone's own shape: the capture field, a card for today's note (it opens the note rather than rendering it — a phone screen is one thing at a time), then the same sections in the same order, with the evening question after the note card. Both shells read from one source, so a tick on the laptop is on the phone the next time the vault moves.

See also: the Timeline, which reads every day the vault holds, and the Calendar, which reads one month.