Templates & Note Creation

The Note Templates & Creation Workflow establishes a standardized, friction-free process for starting new markdown notes. It supports placeholder replacements, auto-discovers built-in/workspace templates, and acts as the front door for AI classification.

1. Overview

Entering high-quality notes into a personal knowledge vault requires consistent formatting. To avoid the blank-slate problem, this feature:

• Provides a quick, menu-driven way to create notes.
• Discovers built-in system templates as well as custom user templates placed in .templates/.
• Performs automatic token replacement for templates (such as {{date}} and {{title}}).
• Creates notes initially as unstructured drafts inside a unified _drafts/ directory so they do not clutter the organized directories before classification.

2. User Experience (UX) Flow

1. Trigger: User runs the AI Notes: New Note command from the Command Palette.
2. Selection: The user is presented with a QuickPick menu listing:
   • Blank note (empty slate)
   • Built-in templates (e.g. meeting, daily)
   • Workspace templates (custom templates from .templates/)
3. Expansion & Generation:

   If a template is selected, the extension reads the template file, automatically swaps template tokens (like {{date}} for current date and {{title}}), generates a unique UUID-based filename (e.g. 29-05-2026_df8s97a6.md), and writes it to _drafts/.

4. Editor Launch: The newly created markdown file is automatically loaded into the active editor, ready for writing.

3. VS Code Workspace Template Mockup

4. Under the Hood & Code Walkthrough

4.1 Gathering Active Templates

The discoverTemplates function scans both built-in resources and workspace configurations asynchronously. The workspace templates enable team collaboration on document standards directly inside a shared git repo:

export async function discoverTemplates(extensionPath: string, workspaceRoot: string): Promise<TemplateInfo[]> {
    const templates: TemplateInfo[] = [];

    // 1. Load built-in templates
    const builtInDir = path.join(extensionPath, 'resources', 'templates');
    try {
        const entries = await fsp.readdir(builtInDir);
        for (const entry of entries) {
            if (entry.endsWith('.md')) {
                templates.push({ name: path.basename(entry, '.md'), filePath: path.join(builtInDir, entry), source: 'built-in' });
            }
        }
    } catch {}

    // 2. Load workspace custom templates
    const workspaceTemplateDir = path.join(workspaceRoot, '.templates');
    try {
        const entries = await fsp.readdir(workspaceTemplateDir);
        for (const entry of entries) {
            if (entry.endsWith('.md')) {
                templates.push({ name: path.basename(entry, '.md'), filePath: path.join(workspaceTemplateDir, entry), source: 'workspace' });
            }
        }
    } catch {}

    return templates;
}

4.2 Variable Replacement Execution

Templates support double curly brace token matching. When triggered, the extension replaces placeholders using a global regular expression:

export function expandTemplateVariables(content: string, title?: string): string {
    let result = content;
    result = result.replace(/\{\{date\}\}/g, formatDateDDMMYYYY());
    result = result.replace(/\{\{title\}\}/g, title || 'Untitled');
    return result;
}