You can configure the way jrnl behaves in a configuration file. By default, this is ~/.jrnl_config. If you have the XDG_CONFIG_HOME variable set, the configuration file will be saved under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/jrnl.
Note
On Windows, The configuration file is typically found at C:\Users\[Your Username]\.jrnl_config.
The configuration file is a simple JSON file with the following options and can be edited with any plain text editor.
paths to your journal files
if set, executes this command to launch an external editor for writing your entries, e.g. vim. Some editors require special options to work properly, see FAQ for details.
if true, encrypts your journal using AES.
Symbols to be interpreted as tags. (See note below)
if you supply a date, such as last thursday, but no specific time, the entry will be created at this time
how to format the timestamps in your journal, see the python docs for reference
if true, tags will be highlighted in cyan.
controls the width of the output. Set to false if you don’t want to wrap long lines.
Note
Although it seems intuitive to use the # character for tags, there’s a drawback: on most shells, this is interpreted as a meta-character starting a comment. This means that if you type
jrnl Implemented endless scrolling on the #frontend of our website.
your bash will chop off everything after the # before passing it to _jrnl_). To avoid this, wrap your input into quotation marks like this:
jrnl "Implemented endless scrolling on the #frontend of our website."
Or use the built-in prompt or an external editor to compose your entries.
Using your DayOne journal instead of a flat text file is dead simple – instead of pointing to a text file, change your .jrnl_config to point to your DayOne journal. This is a folder ending with .dayone, and it’s located at
Instead of all entries being in a single file, each entry will live in a separate plist file.
You can configure _jrnl_ to use with multiple journals (eg. private and work) by defining more journals in your .jrnl_config, for example:
{
...
"journals": {
"default": "~/journal.txt",
"work": "~/work.txt"
}
}
The default journal gets created the first time you start _jrnl_. Now you can access the work journal by using jrnl work instead of jrnl, eg.
jrnl work at 10am: Meeting with @Steve
jrnl work -n 3
will both use ~/work.txt, while jrnl -n 3 will display the last three entries from ~/journal.txt (and so does jrnl default -n 3).
You can also override the default options for each individual journal. If you .jrnl_config looks like this:
{
...
"encrypt": false
"journals": {
"default": "~/journal.txt",
"work": {
"journal": "~/work.txt",
"encrypt": true
},
"food": "~/my_recipes.txt",
}
Your default and your food journals won’t be encrypted, however your work journal will! You can override all options that are present at the top level of .jrnl_config, just make sure that at the very least you specify a "journal": ... key that points to the journal file of that journal.
Note
Changing encrypt to a different value will not encrypt or decrypt your journal file, it merely says whether or not your journal is encrypted. Hence manually changing this option will most likely result in your journal file being impossible to load.