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Comment by michaelangerman | Hacker News Reader

I have been writing down what I do every day since 2002. So 17 years of daily notes about what I did, how I feel, what I was excited about that day. One cool thing about the journal is that it is electronic. So its searchable which is kind of cool. Its always handy to look up stuff you did in the past and when you did it, who you were with, when you went on that great vacation to the beach etc... I highly recommend keeping a journal, for people who are into it.

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What tools are you using to manage all the data/indexing it for search/etc? I've gotten into journaling just this year, and have honestly been contemplating building my own proprietary system for managing them because of how crucial I feel it's become to my lifestyle, but I'd obviously love the opportunity to use something that's already useful.

I have been using pass[1]. Lots of git hosting providers out there and mobile apps. I just have an alias that runs

  pass edit journal/$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')

And I run the alias when the mood hits me. Then

  pass git push origin

[1] https://www.passwordstore.org/

I use `pass` to manage my passwords, and I have a git repository where I run "vim `date -I`" every day to make a daily journal of what I'm doing at work.

But I never thought of combining the two to get encrypted files. Very neat.

That's a really good idea. The format is simple and will probably be readable for many years to come. And it works with the user's preferred editor.

There is also gopass[1] who is compatible with pass and has a few more nice features like the git auto-sync and templates. `gopass template create journal`

[1] https://www.gopass.pw/

I was just thinking of how best to do journaling in an encrypted way and figured pass might work, but then I realised it probably isn't easy to search across notes. Have you found a way to do that that doesn't involve just dumping everything to intermediate plaintext?

It isn't fast but `pass grep SEARCHTERM` works great.

Nice system. Simple and ergonomic. I've used a similar system before but 1) stored locally (never persisting to git) and 2) not using pass + `date`. This streamlines that for me.

So my interface to all of my text files is Redis.

I use the simple Redis data structures to store the data and with a common interface I am able to populate all sorts of different tools for indexing and search.

Then from there I use the following tools...

elasticsearch

https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve

Recently I have been experimenting with...

https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliDB

By maintaining Redis as my interface engine, I can experiment with all sorts of different tools in different programming languages...

Over time I have grown to love Redis as my data store...

Of course I have a simple way of getting the common text files that I write my daily journal in into Redis.

And then from there its just a matter of the common interface into the different indexing / search technologies.

People have these crazy custom systems, and more power to 'em, but I just use Apple Notes connected to my self-hosted mail system (it doesn't need to be self-hosted, just standard IMAP). It stores your notes essentially as pieces of mail in a "Notes" folder, and you can search within the Notes app or any email client (Apple Mail hides the folder, though). Then you get a nice desktop/mobile/tablet apps, rich text editing, and your data stays yours.

I use OneNote. Search is fantastic, I have a section for each year, and a page for each week. I tend to move sections into an Archive notebook when they are a couple years old, but there's no real need to do that.

On iOS, OneNote has a completely broken search experience. That's a showstopper for me.

I've used Penzu for my one-off journaling (https://penzu.com). Their basic free tier worked out perfectly for me.

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