Folder Roles: Research, Trash, Templates, Manuscript, World

Right-click a folder and choose Folder Role to designate it as one of five special folders. A folder with a role assigned shows a leading icon in the binder (🔍/🗑/📋/📖/🌐) instead of a text label. Research, Trash, Templates, and World are exclusive — at most one folder per role, project-wide — but Manuscript isn’t: several folders can hold it at once, e.g. one per book in a series.

• Trash: deleting a file or folder moves it here instead of removing it from disk. Right-click the Trash folder for Empty Trash (permanent, with confirmation), or right-click a trashed item for Restore.
• Templates: any document placed directly inside this folder (not in a subfolder of it) shows up in every other folder’s right-click “New From Template” submenu. Picking one creates a new document from a copy of it — frontmatter included, with template variables substituted — after prompting you for a name. The template itself is never modified.
• Research: currently just a marker with no behavior yet attached — reserved for future features like word-count rollups. Unlike Trash and Templates, Export does not skip a Research-role folder — right-clicking one to export it exports it like any other folder.
• Manuscript: designates a folder as your project’s primary manuscript content, mirroring Scrivener’s Draft folder. File > Export Manuscript… compiles straight from it instead of you having to right-click and find the folder yourself: if no folder has the role yet, it falls back to exporting the whole project; if exactly one does, it exports that folder directly; if more than one does, it opens a submenu to pick which one. It’s also what the Word Count panel’s “Manuscript folders only” tracking scope sums.
• World: like Research, currently just a marker with no behavior yet attached — for a project’s worldbuilding content (characters, locations, items). The World-Building project template tags its World folder with this role automatically.

Template Variables

A template document can use these placeholders, substituted when a new document is created from it (also used by Daily Notes):

For example, a template starting with:

---
type: Scene
---
# ${{name}}

Started ${{date}} at ${{time}}.${{cursor}}

typed into the “New From Template” prompt as “Aria” would produce a document starting with # Aria and today’s date and time in place of ${{date}}/${{time}}, with the cursor left right after “Started … at …”.

The date and time formats are each a single format string, shared by every template — they’re strftime patterns, the same mini-language used by date, printf, and most other tools that format dates from a code (if you know Obsidian’s Periodic Notes plugin, this is the same idea as its moment.js format field, just a different token syntax). They default to %Y-%m-%d and %H:%M (e.g. 2026-07-28 and 14:05) when left blank, unless a placeholder’s own :FORMAT override says otherwise. File > Settings > Templates and File > Project Settings… > Daily Notes both show a live-previewed “Example formats” list of the ready-made formats below, right next to the fields that use them, in addition to this page.

Individual codes, for building your own format — the ones most likely to be useful:

A code with no leading - (e.g. %d, %m) is zero-padded to a fixed width; adding one (%-d, %-m) drops the padding — useful for a human-readable date like July 28, 2026 rather than July 08, 2026. Any character in the format that isn’t a % code (spaces, -, /, ,, letters) passes through literally, which is also how a Daily Notes folder format like Journal/%Y/%m produces a /-separated subfolder path rather than a single filename.

Some common complete formats:

A format that isn’t a valid strftime pattern falls back to %Y-%m-%d (or %H:%M for a time format) automatically, both in a created document and in every live preview of the format — a typo here never blocks document creation.