A few weeks back (as of 2024-09-01) I posted about a tool called jrnl on Mastodon. The post got a fair amount of engagement and discussion, and I’ve also given it a go over the past couple of weeks myself.
jrnl is a command-line tool for keeping a journal. It can be used for quick single-sentence entries or for long-form journaling. Similar to Taskwarrior, it’s a tool that does what it needs to do and then gets out of the way (i.e. you don’t need to open an app and click around to get to your journal).
On a Mac, it’s installed with Homebrew: brew install jrnl.
Once installed, it’s as simple as beginning to use it to log entries;
jrnl This is my first entryjrnl today at 3PM: I walked the dog and bumped into Colinjrnl < longer_form_entry.txt
And querying is just as easy:
jrnl -n 20(show the last 20 entries)jrnl -on yesterday(show entries from yesterday)- etc.
It also supports tagging and encryption. Worth checking out if this sounds interesting.
Kev Quirk followed-up with a blog post discussing this, and how it doesn’t quite meet his needs. Instead, he created a web-based simple journaling tool semi-inspired by jrnl called journal.