3 or 20
My vault has a template for a decision, an idea, a learning, a memory, a question, an asset, a daily note, a weekly plan and a handover between Claude sessions. On 17 October I asked the index how many of them exist.
type: template found three.
The folders named templates and _templates held twenty. Seventeen of them carry the type of the note they create: the decision template says type: decision, the idea template type: idea. They are valid notes with placeholders in them.
That is on purpose. You copy the file, fill in the blanks, and the frontmatter is already right. The cost is that a query on type: decision cannot tell a decision from the skeleton of one, and no list can show you the templates.
What we did
A template is a document, so it gets what every document in the vault gets: properties and a place where it belongs. Claude and I left every template where it was saved. The capture-type templates stay in calendar/_templates, the asset and daily-note templates in areas/system/templates, the decision record templates next to their domain.
Three things changed.
A property says what a template makes. template_for: handover on the handover template. The kind of a template is what it creates, wherever it lives.
One block of rules says what counts as a template. type: template, or a template_for property, or a folder named exactly templates or _templates. Folder notes, documentation and the history area are excluded. A folder called 15_templates is not a template folder, and a test checks that.
One page lists them. Templates sit in the Planning menu next to Plans and Instructions, in the same list as everything else, opened in the same cockpit. Each row shows how many notes in the vault have the type that template makes.
| Template | Saved in | Notes of that type |
|---|---|---|
| Daily note | areas/system/templates | 6,884 |
| Asset | areas/system/templates | 1,167 |
| Decision | calendar/_templates/capture-types | 113 |
| Idea | calendar/_templates/capture-types | 87 |
| Question | calendar/_templates/capture-types | 52 |
That column shows which templates are in use. At the bottom, the BDR template has 4 notes of its type, and no note in the vault carries the type the weekly-plan template makes.
The template that proved the point
The handover template did not exist until that day. The handovers did: 135 notes, each written at the end of a Claude session so the next one could pick up the work. Every title ended with the same sixty characters, "session closed, what a new session needs to know". I had put that there so I could find them, because the notes had no property that said what they were.
The template now carries the standard: kind: handover, a short title, the sections, and a block with the prompt to continue. Claude brought the 135 old notes to it in one scripted pass, with a backup of every file. Each note got the property, and its title and first heading were shortened. File names stayed as they were, because links and my memory index point at them.
The script got one thing wrong. It removed the blank line under the heading in nearly every note and put a stray blank line inside one code block. We found both by comparing every file with its backup, not by trusting the run.
A template sets the standard for the notes written after it. The 135 older ones joined only when someone brought them over.
I have not built the other half: creating a note from a template in the app. It is a write action, and in my setup writes happen on one machine. I will build it after I see which templates I actually reach for.