jrnl - a command line journal tool

 Journalling seems to be having a moment.

It gained some traction during covid lockdowns as a way to help give meaning to what was happening - basically as a form of psychotherapy.

Essentially, it's like keeping a diary in which you write down thoughts, feelings, and the fact that the postie looked at you in a funny way this morning.

Well, I'm not going to talk about that sort of journalling, I'm going to talk about something else.

When I was working I always kept notes and records of meetings and so on.

I must admit I wasn't terribly organised about it, and should have written some structured notes about what happened at the end of each day. Eventually I discovered Planner diaries - the ones with a diary page for a week and a notes page - Leuchtturm and Moleskine both produce them, and I'm sure other people do as well.

And that worked pretty well for me.

Fast forward to 2024. I'm retired but I'm volunteering on two entirely separate archiving projects for two separate bodies.

Lets say the possibilities for confusion are infinite, so at the end of each day's volunteering I write my self some notes about what was discussed, what I did and if there needs to be any special preparation for the next weeks work.

And it works for me, and gives me something to check back on if I've forgotten something.

At the same time, sad anorak that I am, I keep a set of of one line gardening notes in a Notable notebook about when things have been planted out, fed, etc.

So I was interested to come across jrnl, a command line journalling tool for Linux and a few other operating systems

For the moment I'm only trying it out, and I've only installed it on my Lenovo IdeaPad, which runs ubuntu.

Ubuntu, provide a snap meaning installation is literally a couple of clicks - I did find that it helps to have decided where you want your journal file to live, before you start - for the moment mine is in the incredibly unimaginative ~/journal/journal.txt

In use it's incredibly simple - type jrnl to get started, type away and then Ctrl+D exit

and the resulting file looks like

which is pretty simple.

Personally, I think of the design of the program points one to creating a series of terse entries along the lines of 'toner cartridge changed in docuprint', whiich is undoubtedly valuable but would probably bear collating with other notes etc in an end of week write up rather than treated as a journal per se.

For example, when I was cataloguing the contents of Dow's I would write some fairly basic weekly notes about the building temperature, whether I had noticed any degradation in any of the artefacts, and which items had been catalogued.

Jrnl would have been an ideal tool for this.

However in creating a single monolithic text file I could see it becoming unwieldy.

You also of course need to think about backup, perhaps by copying it to a cloud based filestore on a periodic basis, or by using a utility such as deja-dup.

That said, I think it's potentially valuable as a tool for capturing what happened during a day's fieldwork etc, without resorting to anything more complicated than a terminal window ...

[update 13 November 2024]

Well, I went to install jrnl on my Lubuntu machine, and found that the Lubuntu software library tool didn't have it in its list of available packages, so I installed it from the application's website using pipx, and ended up with what is obviously a later version.

In usage it's not that different, but importantly it no longer creates a monolithic text file but creates a set of directories ../year/month and creates individual files named date.txt

so, as today's the 13th we have a file called 13.txt, which makes managing the entries much easier, especially when collating them into a weekly report or something similar ...