This looks to me like an actual bug in the “copydown” feature, rather than anything you need to do differently.
I am moving this post to Bugs and linking it over to the copydown discussion thread for reference.
Legend applies properties to new items if they are required to remain visible in the current pane. Most folks encounter this with Filters – if you filter a Pane on #tag1 and write a new item, Legend will add #tag1 on the end of that item. If it didn’t, that new item would disappear as soon as you moved the cursor. Jay calls this behavior “copydown”. I like this, some hate it…there is ongoing discussion.
Same with “Group-By” (G-B) Panes. Because these group items by property, new items in G-B Panes often need that property added to them when they’re made or else they would disappear. When items are added within the G-B Groups, Legend will add the property required to stay in the Group. If you were grouping by #tag, for example, and added an item under the Group for all items that have #tagX, Legend would append #tagX to that item (if you didn’t do it yourself).
BUT, what you’ve got here is a special case because you’re Grouping By CREATE Date, which is always generated for every item, everywhere, no matter what. It’s a “property” but not a user-applied one. It should never have to be added. You’ll note there is only an “Add Item” command under the Today Group – because you could never create an item “yesterday”. This much is consistent. But it sounds like Legend has its wires crossed a bit and is trying to copydown a !date tag for “today”. There should be no copydown happening at all here.
I actually can’t reproduce this bug on my end, however. It might not be happening for everyone.
I see you are setting up some Journaling. I have tried this in the past – in theory Legend should be extremely powerful for this, which you’ve obviously already realized. Personally I ran into too many roadblocks so I wish you more luck. The two huge obstacles for me were the inability to edit the Creation Date and inability to sort G-B Date Panes. Ivery often am not able to make entries on the same day, or I need to come back to old entries and add forgotten details. This fundamentally undermined the entire structure of the Journal for me since “create date” could not be used to represent the date of the activity I was recording. Then I lost my beans when I realized “Today” was always at the bottom of G-B Create Date Panes and it could not be re-sorted. G-B Date panes, for some insane reason, get the “Agenda Mode” configuration details (Day, Week, Month) instead of the “Sort Items” details like other G-B Panes.
