Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

Evey time I've tried essentially journaling for my own sanity I get too bogged down in the way to actually do it. Logseq and Obsidian are often mentione but by the time I've figured out how the hell to use thier obscure syntax (why the hell am I programming, its a journal) I've lost interest.

I'd like for there to be an out of the box option, but there doesnt seem to be any. When you bring this up in discussions like this it often ends up just proving the point when someone tells you "Oh its easy just install X and then add this plugin, that plugin, tweak this file to do such and such...and my adhd brain lost interest.

There's a real hole in the market for a good out of the box, opensource and self hoated tool that you open the app and write tool, not a note pad, we've all got one of those, I'm talking about somethinh you open, you've got your current day to dump notes into and and they're stored. Sure, theres tools like DayOne, but it's cloud based storage is a catagorical no for me, and many others - theres been countless discussions about this on Reddit, and the answer is always spend half a day screwing around with Logseq or Obsidian and then try to remember their syntax.

The out of the box on both of those is pretty awful, and if the solution is spending hours tweaking it it's not really a solution, its a patch, one that shouldn't really need to be made if it's supposed to be the tool to use.

If all you need is daily notes, Obsidian does that out of the box. You don't have to tweak anything, install any plugins or learn any new syntax if all you need is a simple GUI over text files. It's not open-source however.

Don't get fooled and intimidated by the "productivity porn" community that likes to show off their sophisticated setup and unrealistic workflows. My rule: if they refer to Obsidian as their "second brain", they are part of the cult and should be ignored.

All that said, I strongly encourage you to try pen and paper, the ultimate, no setup, open source app. And it has exquisite haptic feedback on top of that.

What syntax are you trying to use or thinking that you need? In Obsidian for example, remove all plugins except Daily Note and just start typing. Ignore all syntax except maybe bullets. Ignore properties and links. Ignore any habit-tracking or database tricks people say you need. Ignore the graph.

Or consider using Vim/Neovim and set a leader hotkey to open today’s journal/YYYY-MM-DD.txt

> Or consider using Vim/Neovim and set a leader hotkey to open today’s journal/YYYY-MM-DD.txt

For a broader audience: Create a shell script that runs “$EDITOR $JOURNALDIR/$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md”, and bind a system-wide keybinding to run that script. Works even for GUI editors.

This kinda highlights the exact issue I'm talking about. "Just open this, add that, change this, build that...sure it may work, but it's far too much effort for a journal."

I kinda agree that there should be a market for more journaling apps. Something like Logseq for non-programmers would be a hit.

At the same time… I think you overestimate how hard it is to get started with your own solution. The shell script and system-wide keybinding is just a convenience, since many of us like to automate things that we do daily. If you don’t want it you really don’t need it.

Just make one large file in whatever editor you prefer, and keep it always open. Manually add a new heading like “2024-07-14” to that file every day. Write notes in bullet points.

The basic system is independent of any app or script, and is more or less identical to what you would do in a paper journal. It’s a bit harder to add equations and diagrams, but a bit easier to search through it and access it from any device, that’s the trade-off. But writing a date stamp daily is really not a dealbreaker if your top priority is to not configure anything.

It took me a few times to land on something I stuck with. At my current job I have a running doc where I just start a new entry per day, at the top and log before I try to do something, and what progress I made that day.

What maybe helps is this doc is findable and readable by coworkers and my boss. It is very useful for me, but it's also helpful for others to see what I'm working on without pinging me.

I do kind of the same but I’d be concerned to have it readable and n not private. But maybe I shouldn’t be. What’s your thoughts on having it open? I think it would be the first in the company if it’d do that.

Eh, I just try to not slack off too much. I've been doing this for nearly 2 years and so far only benefits as far as I can tell. I think very few people look at it besides myself and occasionally my boss.

Yeah I definitely don’t slack off (at this job, I’m precious it was terrible), so that wouldn’t be the concern. It’s more like I think I’m quite a private person. What would be the benefits that you’ve seen out of it?

Uh, I think just having a clear record of what I did when is helpful. It also is motivating to me, I want to close out items not just write that I started something. I sometimes also put in a todo there if there is just something small at the top of the stack I want to do tomorrow. I'll see the todo there and deal with it first.

Have you tried appending a txt file? If you want to find something, grep it.

Have you tried appending a txt file?

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