Frontmatter

What is Frontmatter?
It's a block of text that comes before anything else in your note and gives it properties. These are simple key: value pairs, like "Status: Active". Each line has has one of those pairs. The block starts and ends with three dashes "---". 

Example:

---
Status: Active
---
# Title of your note
Rest of your note

How is Frontmatter used?
NotePlan uses Frontmatter for the Notes Views/Table, Auto-Templates and Meeting Notes. Also, some Plugins are utilizing the Frontmatter.

For example, the Notes Table allows you to group, filter and sort your notes by the Frontmatter keys and values it can find in your notes. Therefore, it's recommended to equip your notes with Frontmatter, if you want to visualize them later in different ways.

Note Title and Frontmatter

NotePlan uses normally the first non-empty line of a note to determine the note's title. If you are using Frontmatter, NotePlan will ignore the Frontmatter and look for the title of the note below it. 

If you define the title inside the Frontmatter, it will use this as the title.

How to add Frontmatter with a Template?

You can create a template that already contains Frontmatter, so it will be added to your note. For example:

---
title: Project Note Template
---
--
type: 1 - Project / 2 - Idea / 3 - Research
status: 
domain: 
--


# Default Project
Add the details here

Note: To add Frontmatter through a template, you need to define two blocks of Frontmatter inside the template. One is for the template, the other - with only two dashes ("--") instead of three - is for the note.

Now you can create or edit a note and add the template by navigating to the top of the note and inserting the template using CMD+J or the slash menu:

How to create a new note with a Frontmatter Template?

You can also create a new note directly with your Template to add the Frontmatter right away. Hit CMD+J (or the magnifier glass icon bottom right on iOS), then type "/new" and select "/Templating: Create new note using template"