Daily notes & follow-ups

Most of what you want to keep never arrives as a document. It arrives as a half-sentence while you’re doing something else. Quick capture is for that: type it, forget it, and deal with it later.

Capture

Press ⌘⇧N (Ctrl+Shift+N on Windows and Linux), or click Capture in the toolbar. A box opens over whatever you were doing. Type, press Enter, and it’s saved and gone. Esc closes it without saving.

Capture it as a to-do with ⌘⏎ instead of Enter, or by starting the line with []. That writes a real checkbox into the note, which means it turns up under Follow-ups with everything else you owe yourself.

The shortcut works while Wikai is focused. There’s no global hotkey or menu bar icon yet, so it’s not a capture-from-anywhere tool.

Captures land in today’s note for the wiki you’re in — one page per day, timestamped, append-only. If you keep several wikis, ↑ or ↓ from the composer picks which one this capture belongs to, and it remembers your choice for the rest of the run.

Capture a timed entry — a meeting that starts now, a call — with Tab, which opens a small selector of kinds next to the text. Pick one and Enter writes a timed section at the current minute onto the day’s rail instead of a plain capture. Leave it on capture and nothing changes.

Today

The Today button opens today’s note as a timeline: a vertical rail with each capture at the minute you made it, and anything you wrote by hand sitting between. It lives at pages/notes/daily/2026/07/2026-07-12.md — grouped by year and month, so a log you keep for years stays navigable — and it’s an ordinary page you can edit, link to, and search like any other. Its title reads like a date, Sunday 12 July 2026, rather than the file’s stem, and the Daily notes group on the wiki’s overview stays in date order.

• Click an hour and it opens in place, with a composer in the gap, so a note about the 14:20 call lands at 14:20 rather than at the bottom. A stretch right under a timed range starts at that range’s end, so back-to-back meetings fit.
• Click an entry’s time to change its start, end, kind or title in place. Enter saves and leaves you reading; Shift+Enter saves and opens the editor on that entry.
• Intent at the top of the day is for what you mean to do; Reflection at the bottom for what happened. Both are ordinary sections in the page.
• A capture can become a section — promote a one-liner into a heading with a body when it turns out to be a meeting, not a remark.
• Long entries fold, and a quiet stretch of hours folds into a wave, so a day with two meetings’ worth of notes in it stays readable.
• Summarise an entry asks the agent for a short summary of a long one. It’s offered beside the entry, grounded in your wiki, and written into the note only if you take it.
• Capturing while the day is open in the editor lands the capture where it belongs without disturbing your unsaved text.

The caret next to the button opens a calendar — days with a note are marked, so a log you’ve kept for months stays browsable by date rather than by paging backwards. Today and any day ahead are clickable whether or not a note exists: click an empty one to create it and plan it. Past days without a note stay inert.

What the agent does with a capture

When you open today’s note, the agent reads the captures and makes suggestions:

• It classifies each one — todo, question, idea, fact, person, place, meeting.
• It spots references to pages you already have and offers to link them.
• It offers a tidier wording of shorthand you typed in a hurry, which you can accept or dismiss.

Nothing is written without a click. The agent proposes; you accept. Your captures stay exactly as you typed them until you say otherwise.

This runs when you look at the note, not in the background — Wikai isn’t processing your notes while you’re away. In Settings you can set enrichment to Automatic (as captures land), Manual (only when you click Enrich now), or Off. On a metered backend — the Anthropic API, OpenRouter — automatic is unavailable: quietly spending your credits in the background isn’t a thing we’ll do, so use Manual there.

The end-of-day digest

Open End-of-day digest and the day’s captures are sorted into what you might do with them:

• File to the wiki — a fact, person or place that matches an existing page. File appends it there, with a note of the day it came from.
• Research — a question becomes a work document the agent can dig into.
• Follow-ups — to-dos, listed. Make follow-up turns one into a real checkbox in the note (or Make all for the lot), which is what puts it on the Follow-ups view. A capture you already made with ⌘⏎ is a checkbox already and needs no conversion.

Again, one click per item. The digest is a review, not an inbox that empties itself.

Follow-ups

A follow-up is just a Markdown checkbox — - [ ] — anywhere in the wiki. In a daily note, in a book chapter’s margin, in a project page. The Follow-ups view collects every open one.

There is only one kind of to-do in Wikai: whether you typed the checkbox yourself, captured it with ⌘⏎, or converted it from the digest, it’s the same - [ ] on disk and it lands in the same place.

Lists stay lists. If two or more checkboxes sit together on a page, they show up as one row with a count, which you expand to see the items — so a shopping list is one follow-up, not thirty. A lone checkbox is its own row. Rows remember whether you left them open.

Tick a box here and it’s ticked where it lives — Wikai writes the change back to the source page, touching nothing else on the line.

You can add a due date and tags in the text of the checkbox itself:

- [ ] call the school @2026-07-01 #admin

Dated items sort first, an Overdue filter picks out what’s past, and you can filter by tag. The date has to be written as @YYYY-MM-DD — Wikai doesn’t parse “tomorrow”, and it won’t remind you. It’s a list, not an assistant with a calendar.

Put a checklist on today’s plan

A checklist anywhere in the wiki has a star in its header. Star it, and the whole list appears under today’s Intent — as a reference to the original, not a copy. Tick a box there and the source page is updated; the follow-up stays the follow-up, in the one place it lives. Done items are struck through rather than hidden, on the day and at the source alike, so the two never disagree.

The star’s caret opens a small calendar: star the days you mean to work on the list to plan a week, or take a list off a day from the day itself.

Worth knowing

• Enrichment only runs on notes you actually open. Never open Today, and nothing gets classified.
• Only timestamped capture lines get the agent’s treatment. Prose you type into the daily note by hand is left alone.
• Editing a capture after it’s been classified means it gets re-read the next time you look.
• File appends to the end of the destination page. It doesn’t try to guess the right section.
• Ticking a grouped list means ticking its items — there’s no “check them all” box on the group.

Last updated 2026-10-07.