Smart Dates in Obsidian With Espanso

I use some plugins in Obsidian to help me keep track of job tasks. It is a combination of Templater, Tasks, Dataview, and MetaEdit. The latter is handy for editing frontmatter from a Dataview table without opening the file itself; however, when I want to set dates, there is no helper (i.e., calendar or smart date parsing, something like “input: next week, output: 2023-04-13”). I already use Espanso - A Privacy-first, Cross-platform Text Expander to set today’s date, but knowing that the Linux date built-in binary can do smart dates pretty quickly, I looked into the documentation of Espanso to create a bridge between the text editor (this time Obsidian) and the shell. It was relatively easy.

On a shell the command is simply

date -d "next week" +%F  # +%F is the format YYYY-MM-DD

The Expanso configuration is

  - regex: ";(?P<smart>.*);"
    replace: "{{output}}"
    vars:
      - name: output
        type: shell
        params:
          cmd: "date -d \"{{smart}}\" +%F"

So, when I type ;next week; in Obsidian¹ I get a smart generated date