Skip to content

Advanced Categories

The Advanced Categories feature is a powerful system for organizing and visualizing your events. It works by parsing a Category and optional Sub-Category from your event titles, unlocking features like fine-grained color-coding and the upcoming Timeline View.

This system is designed to work across all calendar sources, including remote calendars like Google Calendar and iCal feeds, making it a universal standard for your vault.

Why You Should Use This

  • See Your Life at a Glance: Assign unique colors to "Work," "Personal," "Fitness," etc., to instantly see how your time is allocated.
  • Future-Proof Your Vault: This system is the foundation for many upcoming features, including timeline views and advanced analytics. Adopting it now will ensure you get the most out of Full Calendar.
  • Universal Compatibility: A single, consistent organizational method for local and remote events.

The Title Format

The plugin uses a specific format to identify categories and sub-categories in your event titles.

Category - Sub-Category - Event Name

The delimiter is a dash surrounded by spaces (-).

  • ✅ Correct: Work - Project Sync - Daily Standup
  • ✅ Correct: Personal - Run (Sub-category is optional)
  • ❌ Incorrect: Work-Project Sync (Missing spaces around the dash)

When displayed on the calendar, the Category is stripped from the title to keep the view clean (e.g., you'll see Project Sync - Daily Standup). The full title is always preserved in the note.

Why this format?

This title-based approach was chosen for maximum compatibility. Most remote calendar systems (like Google Calendar) don't have a dedicated "category" field that syncs externally. By embedding the category in the title, you can organize events from any source, and the plugin will recognize them.

Enabling Advanced Categories

This feature can perform a one-time, permanent modification of your event notes. It is highly recommended to back up your vault before enabling this feature.

  1. Go to Full Calendar Settings → Advanced categorization and Timeline.
  2. Toggle "Enable Advanced Categorization" on.
  3. A warning modal will appear explaining the permanent changes. After proceeding, a second modal will ask how you want to bulk-categorize your existing local events:
    • Use Parent Folder (Smart): For any event that doesn't already have a category, its parent folder's name will be used as the category. This is the safest and most common choice.
    • Use Parent Folder (Forced): The parent folder's name will be prepended to all event titles, even if they already have one. Use with caution, as this can create nested categories (e.g., NewCat - OldCat - Title).
    • Forced Default Update: You provide a default category, and it will be prepended to all event titles.

Managing Category Colors

Once enabled, a new management section will appear in the settings.

  • Add a Category: Start typing in the "Add a new category..." input box. It provides autocomplete suggestions for categories found in your vault that you haven't configured yet. Click Add.
  • Change Color: Click the color swatch next to any category to open a color picker.
  • Delete a Setting: Click Delete to remove a category's color setting. This does not remove the category from your event titles.
  • Save: After making changes, click Save Category Settings.

Disabling & Cleaning Up

If you decide to turn this feature off, the plugin will help you clean up your notes.

  1. Toggle "Enable Advanced Categorization" off in settings.
  2. A warning modal will explain that this will remove known category prefixes from your event titles and file names. It will also permanently delete your saved category color settings.
  3. If you proceed, the plugin will process all your local calendars to remove the Category - prefix, restoring them to their original state.