By Jack Baty in Emacs —

Formatting dates in org-capture templates

I track my weight in an Org-mode table. New entries are added using an Org-mode capture template. It was bugging me that the date format was a full-on Org-mode inactive timestamp like [2024-01-01 Mon]. I just wanted the YYYY-MM-DD portion, but Org's expansion templates don't have an option for that.

Today I learned that I can use any Emacs date format string in the capture template. I'm using %<%F> which displays the ISO 8601 date, just like I want.

("W" "Weight" table-line
    (file+olp "~/org/daybook.org" "Weight Tracking" "Data")
     "| %<%F> | %? | | |"
     :unnarrowed t)

I learn something every day.

π