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Shell-friendly journalling

journal in the spirit of Unix.

This defines a folder structure to keep your thoughts in, $JOURNAL/$YEAR/$MONTH/$DAY.md, titling and opening each file for you at a keystroke.

It's meant to encourage introspection by keeping it close at hand.

Works with (and through) any basic text editor, and is compatible with Diary.apk (if you can figure out a way to sync your locked-down Android files with your gnu/looniks freesoftware laptop), or any text editor with Markdown support like vscode or Ghostwriter).

Requirements:

  • GNU date (so, probably basically Linux-only, please forgive)
  • sh

Installation

Download and copy journal onto your PATH.

You can do this with

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
echo "export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin" >> ~/.profile
ln journal ~/.local/bin/

Usage

( for now: see the comments in the shell script itself )

rjournal

This is a wrapper script that I use to share my journal across all of my computers.

Requirements

  • The same as above plus
  • mountpoint (from util-linux)

Installation

Install it the same way:

ln rjournal ~/.local/bin/

Get a remote disk somewhere, e.g. https://rsync.net, your own server, a VPS, a NextCloud server like https://cloudamo.com/ or https://thegood.cloud/ or https://www.owncube.com/, and setup a user-mountable entry in /etc/fstab for it:

[email protected]$ mkdir ~/Notebook

user@local$ mkdir ~/Notebook

# /etc/fstab
# ...
[email protected]:Notebook /home/user/Notebook fuse.sshfs idmap=user,reconnect,auto_unmount,transform_symlinks,noauto,user    0 0

(you could also use cifs/smb/afp/WebDAV/any of the other wild filesystem options out there, which would allow you to use Google Drive, Dropbox, etc)

echo "alias journal=rjournal" >> ~/.profile

(and reload your shell)

Then just

journal [DATE]

and you'll be journalling to the cloud. Hooray! (pick your server wisely, yah?)

Tips and Tricks

Try adding this to your ~/.bashrc:

if [ $(($RANDOM % 100)) -lt 30 ]; then
  echo "Your Hypertext Memory:"
  echo
  EDITOR="cat" journal $(($(($RANDOM % 12)) + 2)) days ago | shuf -n 5
fi

Make it even more accessible with

alias j=journal

TODO

  • write a markdown-reader that picks out a random paragraph to print; use that instead of EDITOR=cat | shuf -n 5, which just picks a random set of lines
  • import useful features from https://journalcli.me/docs/getting-started and org-mode
    • calendar integration
    • reminders
    • automatically copy unfinished TODOs forward