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Comment by shpx | Hacker News Reader

Here is my privacy centric, offline first, personal journal bash script

    EDITOR=vim
    journal() {
        mkdir -p ~/journal/`date +%Y`
        $EDITOR ~/journal/`date +%Y`/`date +%m-%d`
    }
    alias j=journal

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Thanks. Are you planning on selling this as a service? Maybe with blockchain verification? How about creating a marketplace so that others can share journal templates? Is there iCloud backup? Would be nice to have private messages between members and social status that people can "like".

:-)

[flagged]

Hey, this is HN. Sarcasm and witty remarks are verboten. :-)

Humor is not one of HN's strong suits.

And sarcasm is the lowest form of humor.

A simple "/s" or "/sarcasm" as the internet is not particularly good at transferring voice, tone, and feelings even with a good connection :)

EDIT: guess I should have "/humor"

All hilarious mocking aside (although you should probably turn this into a SaaS somehow and get it in the cloud), I've been using a simple .txt file for journaling since i started first my professional software gig in 2014.

It has gone through multiple forms, once where i created a new file everyday, and it wasnt automated much. One day I realized I could be even MORE lazy and started automating a bit. Now i have one file, with a heading for each day. I have the vim command saved as an alias now 'journal'. It opens up the file, moves to the end, and enters insert mode :p

    alias journal='vim "+normal Go" +startinsert /worklog/start_20160426'

I use git and surround my note taking scripts with these two functions.

# Pull Notes to make sure you are completely up to date before editing.

function pull_notes() {

  (
    cd $NOTES_DIR
    git stash
    git pull
    git stash pop
  )

}

# Push Notes up the git repo that these are attached to.

function push_notes() {

  date=$(date)
  (
    cd $NOTES_DIR
    git add .
    if [[ $(git status -s) ]]; then
      git commit -m "Notes Updated: $date"
      git push
    fi
  )
}

http://jrnl.sh/

I like the mkdir -p for each date, tho I might do that by day instead of year.

My scripts for writing, and recording audio:

(cd writes/journal/; vi $(date '+%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S') -c 'startinsert')

arecord -D plughw:$1,0 ditties/$(date '+%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S').wav -f FLOAT_LE -r 48000

That's a good way to capture thoughts, but the review process and linking of notes is less than perfect.

If you want that, try TiddlyWiki[1] -- an actual offline-first system for journaling and notes.

It's a single, self-contained HTML file. You download it, add data, then overwrite the file with a new version which includes changes.

If you want to go fancy, you can install it on a server with Node.js and stuff, but there's not a need to go there.

[1]https://tiddlywiki.com/

I'll second TiddlyWiki. I've used it for several years and became a fan early on.

These days you might run across some hiccups in getting it to work in your browser of choice. Over the years the browser vendors became less and less inclined to allow javascript and extensions attain local file editing permissions. That's pretty reasonable, but annoying.

A pretty decent alternative that I've been using for months, now, is an app called Tiddly Desktop. It's an NW.js-based app so it has no trouble accessing the local filesystems.

>These days you might run across some hiccups in getting it to work in your browser of choice.

Never experienced any problems whatsoever across FF/Chrome/etc

I just generate a new HTML file with changes for saving.

Requires remembering to do something to save changes, but I come from the time where autosaving wasn't the norm anyway :)

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