jrnl

jrnl is a simple journal application for your command line. Journals are stored as human readable plain text files - you can put them into a Dropbox folder for instant syncinc and you can be assured that your journal will still be readable in 2050, when all your fancy iPad journal applications will long be forgotten.

Why keep a journal?

Journals aren't only for 13-year old girls and people who have too much time on their summer vacation. A journal helps you to keep track of the things you get done and how you did them. Your imagination may be limitless, but your memory isn't. For personal use, make it a good habit to write at least 20 words a day. Just to reflect what made this day special, why you haven't wasted it. For professional use, consider a text-based journal to be the perfect complement to your GTD todo list - a documentation of what and how you've done it.

How to use?

to make a new entry, just type

jrnl yesterday: Called in sick. Used the time to clean the house and spent 4h on writing my book.

and hit return. yesterday: will be interpreted as a timestamp. Everything until the first sentence mark (.?!) will be interpreted as the title, the rest as the body. In your journal file, the result will look like this:

2012-03-29 09:0 Called in sick. 
Used the time to clean the house and spent 4h on writing my book.

If you just call jrnl, you will be prompted to compose your entry - but you can also configure jrnl to use your external editor.

Smart timestamps:

If we start our entry by e.g. yesterday: or last week monday at 9am: the entry's date will automatically be adjusted.

Viewing:

jrnl -10   

will list you the ten latest entries,

jrnl -from "last year" -to march   

everything that happened from the start of last year to the start of last march.

Note: jrnl has to modes: composing and viewing. The mode depends on which arguments (starting with -) you specify. If no arguments are given, jrnl will guess the mode: if all the input looks like tags, it will switch to viewing mode and filter by the specified tags., such as in

jrnl @WorldDomination

If there is some non-argument input, jrnl will treat it as a new entry, such as in

jrnl july 4th: Aliens blew up the white house.

If there is no input, you can still go to viewing mode by just hitting return when prompted to compose an entry.

Tagging:

Keep track of people, projects or locations, by tagging them with an @:

Wonderful day on the #beach with @Tom and @Anna.

You can filter your journal entries just like this:

jrnl @pinkie @WorldDomination

Will print all entries in which either @pinkie or @WorldDomination occured;

jrnl -n 5 -and @pineapple @lubricant

the last five entries containing both @pineapple and @lubricant. You can change which symbols you'd like to use for tagging in the configuration.

JSON Export

Can do:

jrnl -json

Installation

...

Advanced configuration

The first time launched, jrnl will create a file called .jrnl_config in your home directory. It's just a regular json file:

{
    journal:        "~/journal.txt",
    editor:         "",
    encrypt:        false,
    key:            ""
    tagsymbols:     '@'
    default_hour:   9,
    default_minute: 0,
    timeformat:     "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M",
}

• journal: path to your journal file
• editor: if set, executes this command to launch an external editor for writing your entries, e.g. vim or subl -w (note the -w flag to make sure jrnl waits for Sublime Text to close the file before writing into the journal).
• encrypt: if true, encrypts your journal using AES encryption.
• key: you may store the key you used to encrypt your journal in plaintext here. This is useful if your journal file lives in an unsecure space (ie. your Dropbox), but the config file itself is more or less safe.
• tagsymbols: Symbols to be interpreted as tags. (See note below)
• default_hour and default_minute: if you supply a date, such as last thursday, but no specific time, the entry will be created at this time
• timeformat: how to format the timestamps in your journal, see the python docs for reference

Note on tagsymbols: 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.