Some days I forget to run Denote to create a new journal file for the day, and then the appropriately named note file is missing when I want to write down things later. That’s not how you use a daily journal, I know, but I use Emacs and denote.el to write down things like exercise logs or when I get sick, and these are information I can backfill easily the day after.

A solution that works for me is to (setq denote-prompts '(date)) – then I can run M-x denote-create-note and enter the date to backfill. It won’t insert the appropriately formatted title or tags of my journal notes, but that’s not a big deal.

Learn How to Find This in a Foreign Code Base

My denote-id-format is "%Y%m%d%H%M" (a date-time string that produces 2024-06-27 07:14 but without any separators and punctuation), so I started looking from there:

1. From the C-h v variable overview, select the denote-id-format variable.
2. In the help buffer, follow the link to denote.el’s source code at the top. This takes you to where the variable is defined.
3. Run M-x occur on the variable name to find where it’s being used.
4. One of the few occurrences is denote-prompt-for-date-return-id, which sounds exactly like what I want! But it’s not interactive, so:
5. Run M-x occur on denote-prompt-for-date-return-id to find where this is being used.
6. That took me to the middle of denote-dired-rename-files, a rather long function, and I found that the prompt is being run based on the denote-prompts variable.

Setting denote-prompts to '(date) and running denote-create-note afterwards confirmed that this did the trick.

I admit I didn’t actually run M-x occur manually, but resorted to embark-act on the symbol-at-point for everything. I used Embark to run occur, to change denote-prompts from the variables list, even to insert the denote-id-format value above.