Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils | Hacker News Reader

Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

tangled.sh

206 pointsicy64 comments

I don't see what nix is doing for you? There's vim, absolutely, coreutils (though I don't immediately see anything GNU-specific), and a tiny wrapper script that happens to be written in flake.nix but could trivially be factored out. I don't see anything that I wouldn't expect to run on, say, OpenBSD if you installed vim.

(That said, yes, it's a nice journaling system)

This is a pretty poor example for a few reasons, but the idea is that anyone get can a shell with the tool fully installed along with all its dependencies, with a single command:

nix shell 'git+https://tangled.sh/@oppi.li/journal'

It's massive overkill for a shell alias, but for a more complex project it can be very nice.

One area that is especially a massive win is projects that cross multiple ecosystems. So like, C++ project with some Python bindings and a Typescript frontend? Setting up that dev environment is often a nightmare but Nix makes it trivial and highly reproducible.

Sure; I'm typing this comment on a NixOS machine in a browser controlled from a flake I wrote myself - I get using nix and flakes in general. It's just that this particular case seems like such overkill that it actually seems like a weird tradeoff even if you're used to flakes.

Yea I don't see Nix doing much here particularly, but for me I typically would do something like this to make the system as consistent as possible over a long period of time without being actively maintained.

I guess this does ensure the key `journal` command works exactly the same because the dateutils binary will stay locked to the version in the `flake.lock`.

I would have assumed that nvim would also be locked because that's where I would expect more possible breaking changes with the existing special config.

With little tools/projects like these I could easily see months-years before it would get any active attention from me again (or simply I wouldn't be using it; so it doesn't matter).

Bring back blosxom: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blosxom

Oh wow, I had completely forgotten about Blosxom!

I take it from your post that it is no more?

I was somewhat expecting that the flake would include nvim bundled with the vimrc in the folder.

You could then just open nvim in the `nix develop` environment (or even use something like direnv to activate it when you cd in) and have a minimal journaling environment

Yeah, if it included ex. nvim plugins then it would make more sense to me. It's just this particular combination is for installing tools that I struggle to imagine aren't default-installed everywhere, and version-locking some of the most stable programs I've ever used (though I guess neovim might make breaking changes?). Honestly it strikes me as most useful as a 'hello world 2.0' flake demo.

Bundling a little script into your path like that is pretty cool, just overkill to use a flake + nix for _just_ that

author seems to be the type to follow tech trends and use them to signal "coolness" - people like that use these absurd stacks because its niche, not for any actual benefit

If you want week numbers in the calendar, you can use `ncal -w` and they'll be the last row. Add a `-3` and you get:

    $ ncal -w3
        July 2025         August 2025       September 2025
    Mo     7 14 21 28        4 11 18 25     1  8 15 22 29
    Tu  1  8 15 22 29        5 12 19 26     2  9 16 23 30
    We  2  9 16 23 30        6 13 20 27     3 10 17 24
    Th  3 10 17 24 31        7 14 21 28     4 11 18 25
    Fr  4 11 18 25        1  8 15 22 29     5 12 19 26
    Sa  5 12 19 26        2  9 16 23 30     6 13 20 27
    Su  6 13 20 27        3 10 17 24 31     7 14 21 28
       27 28 29 30 31    31 32 33 34 35    36 37 38 39 40

There is also a `-b` flag to get it back in to the shape you'd expect from cal. I find the week column easier to read in that form:

   w| Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
  31|              1  2  3
  32|  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

Perhaps worth noting that ncal's -w is ISO-8601 compliant¹, which may surprise some people around new year as week numbers can reset in December or January.

[Said as someone who aliases cal to "ncal -wb" mostly just to get the correct first day of the week for their locale.]

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date

So, I've been keeping a journal for 17 years, off and on. I don't know anyone else who does it my way, so here's my method.

I made a dedicated email account just for the journal. I personally chose gmail but if you distrust google you could use any other provider including self-hosted.

At the end of the day, or when I feel like it, I log in and email the account from itself with a message about whatever happened that day and whatever I'm thinking or feeling, and use the date for the subject line, like "August 12, 2025". I never, ever send emails to anything else from that account nor connect it to anything or use it for anything else. It is a total island.

The result is 17 years of easily-searchable journal, password-protected, backed-up, accessible from anywhere that has internet, can't be "lost" like a physical journal (yes I know I'm trusting google, but again, go self-host if you're worried about that), can't be "found" by someone looking through my things.

I can't even tell you how much value I've gotten out of it. You forget things you don't even know you forgot. So many little moments and days in life. You'll be shocked at the things you used to think and feel sometimes. You'll be shocked at whole magical days that you haven't thought of in years and years and likely would never have thought of again. It's a record of me changing over time and the phases I've gone through. I can't recommend it enough.

And it doesn't take much discipline, either. It's not something I "have" to do. I do it when I feel like it. There are years where I have only 25 entries, and others where I have 200. It depends how much I felt like writing. I find it spikes in years where I'm feeling very emotional, usually during bad times. But I've written down many great days too.

I do a similar thing when I walk my dog. I have this primitive audio recorder app on my Android phone - the only requirement I had years ago when I found it was to be able to record directly into mp3 files, but that is no longer relevant. Anyway, I would just walk and talk into my phone. It records. I have collected numerous such recordings over the years, but they were pretty much useless. Until relatively recently. These days I have Resilio (for a stupid reason, not Syncthing, which is also a viable and perhaps better alternative) to sync my audio notes, and then I have a script with whisper.cpp hooked up. The script simply turns that into text - technically, it creates a subs file. Why subs file? With the .srt file I can not only grep through those notes, I can play them karaoke style in my editor - Emacs has subed mode that allows you do that. I can also easily hide timestamps and other metadata to focus purely on the text. I can correct wrong text recognitions, add my own comments, etc.

A message in a bottle, thrown into your own swimming pool every evening. I like it.

My wife does that and I am going to start today after reading your post. (She mentioned it years ago but I didn’t get it, comes with the handle).

I love this take. I do something similar, in that my journal is completely isolated

For journal entries I record voice notes. I can do it quicker, and I can do it while I'm e.g. driving or walking. I feel that I capture a bit more emotion with it too. I've been doing this for about 20 years, but only in the last year have I been writing a python application to organize and transcribe the notes.

Do you do any edits for previous days? Seems like it would be difficult with email.

No. But editing a handwritten journal would hardly be any easier. It's a matter of what features you care about, I guess. I have never needed to edit past entries - that would be historical revisionism. It's not a feature I personally need for my journal. If I cared about that for some reason, I suppose I might use a different method.

If I realize I forgot something from yesterday, I just add it the next day.

You could theoretically reply to a previously sent letter from either your main or "journal" email to "update" an entry.

Yes, I have done that on occasion! No idea why this comment is flagged.

I’ve been journaling on and off since the early 2000s — but never for long. A few weeks in, I’d usually stop. Often because what I wrote felt too trivial to be worth it.

Then, while reading some productivity book, I stumbled on a trick: set the bar for success absurdly low. So low that even on my worst days I could still clear it.

Enter The One-Line Journal: the goal is to write just one single line each day. And, as it turns out, most days that first sentence is quickly followed by a few more — sometimes a lot more. I’ve been doing it almost every single day for 2.5 years now.

In the spirit of keeping the barrier low, I deliberately start with a blank slate each morning by creating a new file for that day. The fresh page lowers the threshold even further. Everything is done in Vim with this little alias:

oneline='printf "## $(date +"%Y") \n \n#" >> /path/to/folder/year/$( date +"%Y-%j-%b-%d" )_ol-jrnl.md && vim +$ /path/to/folder/year/$( date +"%Y-%j-%b-%d")_ol-jrnl.md'

Nothing fancy. Just works for me.

I should do that more, the one-line thing. I figured out the "absurdly low bar" trick myself for a lot of other stuff in my life but I hadn't thought to apply it to this. Good suggestion!

Would you mind sharing where else in your life you have applied that trick? I always find it quite fascinating to hear about practical use cases because, while the idea of "Start simple, start small" is so simple conceptually, it's hard to get out of your head sometimes, so hearing actual real-world examples can be quite inspiring.

In my case I wanted to get back into working out more but the pandemic had completely messed up my existing workout routines, plus I travel a lot, so it's not easy to build new habits, either. So I decided I would just do one single exercise every day – doesn't matter when or what, as long as I do something.

I ended up doing the exercise usually right after getting up in the morning to build as strong a habit as possible. Also, I usually do 4 minutes instead of a fixed number of reps because 1) this way I can fully focus on perfecting the movement, 2) when it's early in the morning I often forget to count anyway, 3) this way I always know how long it's gonna take, so even on busy days I can make time.

Then once I had mastered that habit, I decided hey, why not try to do two exercises per day whenever possible? It's only 5 minutes more (including a 1 min break) but 100% more impact!

Now, recently, I've started doing 3-4 exercises because why not, it's only 5-10 minutes more for another 50-100% increase in gains! I think this – (up to) 20 min every morning – is probably my sweet spot. I get a decent workout, yet I can still squeeze it even into the busiest of days with relative ease, as long as I've made it a habit and don't waste time thinking about & hesitating to do it and instead just do it.

Sure! Number 1 is, as you said, exercise. If I can't get myself to do a full routine, I reduce it to "just go do bench press for today. nothing else." Because doing a bench press set beats not exercising at all!

Likewise I found getting myself to run a mile regularly was not happening. So I reduced it to running half a mile. That's pretty doable. That's 5 minutes of effort.

I do it with my coding projects. If I can't bring myself to really seriously spend hours progressing on my code, I'll do the absolute bare minimum just to move the needle forward a millimeter - write a boilerplate react component template that isn't much more than a div with the right class on it, or write the skeleton for an endpoint (like its function signature) but none of the actual logic, or simply write out a quick pseudocode of the steps for what i need to do the next time i work on it.

I do it with chores. Can't get myself to do laundry? Ok, instead just move the laundry to be sitting next to the basement door. Next time I go down for something else, I just take it with me and stick it in the machine since it was already right there. Same with dishes - don't want to do all of them - ok, just load the plates for now and leave the rest for later.

I do it with mail that requires a response, like bills. Don't want to go through all of them? Just do the one on top and do another tomorrow. (I don't get enough mail that it piles up faster than I can keep up with.)

I do it with guitar. Don't want to practice for half an hour? Okay, just do chord switching for 3 or 4 minutes.

When I describe it all this way, it makes me sound like someone who barely gets anything done, but the reality is I actually get A LOT done because of these tricks. Once I'm playing guitar for 3 minutes it usually becomes 30. Once I pseudocode a function I usually just write the whole thing. Once I put away the plates I usually just clear the whole sink. And if it gets put off for a day, that's fine. It's all about tricking myself into being disciplined.

Thanks so much, those are some great examples (and indeed ones I've been struggling with myself so far)! It sounds like you've successfully adopted a general habit of "just starting, no matter how small the increment". Quite inspiring – I will try to follow in your footsteps! :-)

WTF wish I thought of this 17 years ago

The best time to start journaling is 17 years ago, or today.

Knew you'd get comments asking why nix is important to the setup. I like it for things like this as well.

Shell scripting by default has terrible isolation. But the way Nix puts shell scripts together, you can be confident that a script's own PATH only contains what it needs to, which is a nice guarantee to have.

Nix always felt like an OS on the blockchain. It's fine if you value verifiability above everything, but becomes very burdensome if you find yourself tweaking your dev environment often. Still, I think it probably teaches good discipline.

I've found NixOS is fantastic for evolving my environment. Update `configuration.nix` and then `sudo nixos-rebuild switch`. Done.

What kind of "tweaks" are you doing? You could use `nix-shell` to try out a new environment. If you like it the environment, you can make it declarative by creating a `shell.nix` file.

If you want to go further, you might make consider making a flake, but I would recommend reading https://nix.dev/concepts/flakes.html first.

> Nix always felt like an OS on the blockchain. It's fine if you value verifiability above everything, but becomes very burdensome if you find yourself tweaking your dev environment often.

With Nix, "dev environment" can be scoped to be specific to a project. Where on a typical system, you might install a compiler & libraries, with Nix you can describe the development environment in isolation. (Dev Containers uses containers to similar effect).

I'd rephrase your comment as: NixOS is anti-practical. Rather than just changing a config (& restarting a service), you have to change a NixOS config, rebuild that, & switch to the updated config. -- I'd say NixOS (and Nix) support the mindset of "put in all the effort up front now, in order to save effort later".

If someone's written a nix-shell or devenv file for a project, then no further effort is required to get a working dev environment setup. (Devenv is notable for nicer DX over docker-compose for things like "services.postgres.enable = true" to get a working DB).

I've gone full NixOS on my laptop and my gaming/homeserver desktop. I love it (even if there are parts I hate) and will never move to anything "less declarative". 100% no regrets.

However, I only recommend it with the caveat that the practical benefits are not worth the time invested and it's only worth it as a fun hobby. I think an immutable desktop like Silverblue/Bazzite is really the sweet spot.

Nix (non-OS) as a way to define dev environments though? Incredible, would recommend it in a heartbeat. Opening a project and knowing you are going to have the exact versions of all dependencies you need is so refreshing, or seeing that a public git repo has a `flake.nix` and being able to `nix run <url>` and download/build the project in one command is truly magic.

Gonna sound like a lunatic, but I have used AI agents to set up flake.nix for the following things:

- My basic nix-darwin and home-manager setup for my laptop

- Declarative tooling install for my clone of an open source Rust project

- LaTeX setup for my notes for a book club, including creating a nix package inside the flake to install the version of Garamond I wanted. Traditionally, installing LaTeX and non-free-fonts involves running a bunch of commands as root and praying. This is way better.

It took a lot of prodding and telling it things like "you'll know you did it right when `make all` works", but they all ended up working exactly how I wanted them to.

I’ve made the compromise of using nix package manager on a normal Linux distro. Gives most of the features I care about, with basically no downsides.

Nix + Home Manager is a good combo if you don’t want to go the whole way. But yes, I would recommend starting with just Nix.

here I am tangenting into wtf tangled.sh is, maybe that's the entire point of this submission.

I've seen it quite a bit on BlueSky with some devs I follow. It's a social git host built on-top of ATProto (The underlying tech of BlueSky): https://blog.tangled.sh/intro

Yeah, this is a good blog article and a great pitch for this service. There was a discussion yesterday about where to look for the next github...

I wish all my todo items had 2-3 words. This looks fine with the examples but I bet it’s not so clean with realistic data.

I haven't read the fine article yet, but as a tangent I try to keep my TODOs as "verb noun [- description]".

  - buy milk
  - call doctor - shoulder
  - call mechanic - head gasket

The terseness helps me review them quickly. And being able to review them quickly enables me to do them quickly.

This is a great intro to in both Vim and general unix text processing.

When I first started reading I thought, why not use Vimwiki or org?

I’ve use vimwiki for years but I really like the approach taken here. It’s simple and robust.

Making use of Vim’s built in abbreviations and syntax highlighting is a neat touch.

what is this nix religion I keep hearing about

Nix is a form of computing that's simultaneously 20 years in the past and 20 years in the future. I love it.

Honest answer though, it's a deterministic way of building up a computer/environment. Think pip/uv/packages.lock but for everything.

open to the select few who are able to ignore what the official documentation says and spend some on the (admittedly friendly) irc channel to learn how it REALLY works.

I've only dabbled, but what have you learned in the irc that isn't in the docs?

Haven't tried in a while and haven't checked the documentation now but back then the method for installing packages in the docs was commented on like "yeah you're not supposed to do that". Features were in a perpetual "experimental" but not really state.

Regarding "not supposed to do that": the docs mention you can install packages with commands like "nix-env -iA <package name>", using nix approximately the same way as apt or pacman. -- Trouble is, this is kindof a footgun. (e.g. it's a bad idea to run this command with sudo, even though you'd use sudo for equivalent commands). So, it's easier to just say "you're not supposed to do that".

Right . But it's a bunch of this. Another example is flakes. It was behind an experimental flag and was apparently what everybody was using already. There was only 3rd party documentation if I remember correctly. Twice I tried to use Nix and twice it kicked my ass. I never had this experience with any other unixy end-user software.

I've done ok without irc, though now you mention it, I do miss me some irc.

Deterministic but when the next gcc (or %insert_big_dependency%) update happens all your more obscure packages are broken for a couple of weeks.

Don't update immediately? Update immediately, but selectively? Nix offers many options here.

simply staying on stable channel makes this a non-problem :)

Besides, Nix is even better for such breakages. If GCC breaks you packages, the system does not build and never gets into broken state, all the while old system remains available and kicking.

i guess its for people who need to use things like node, npm, python etc. where dev environments and tools never seem to work out of the box and everyone uses different not-backward-compatible packages.

I've been doing similar in org-mode for several years at this point, though I have returned to pen and paper now.

Org-mode gets immensely underrated, even though it's easily deserves the title of the best possible medium for note-taking. The degree it allows so much flexibility is astonishing, especially with Org-roam and similar alternatives - I no longer even need think how to organize my notes - I write something down, knowing that it never gets lost.

I've never found organizing notes purely by calendar dates to be ideal - I rarely think "didn't we discuss load testing with Bob sometime last October?" Instead, when I tag Bob and add a 'Load Testing' tag to my note, which automatically gets filed in Org-mode's date-tree outline, I can always find it - whether through Bob, 'Load Testing', or the date itself..

And because just like in the article - the notes are in plain text, it opens possibilities for easy syncing, version control & backup, and any other automations. Add to that a tons of other features like having executable source blocks where you can pipe data through, or pdf annotations, LaTeX embeddings, incredible LLM integration, spreadsheet-like calculations, publishing machinery, etc.. There's simply no better alternative - for me, if it ain't the pen&paper - it has to be in Org-mode. And I too, tried tons of different approaches before finding Org-mode.

If getting into Emacs and Org-mode feels too much for you right now, still, do yourself a favor, read this book - "How to take smart notes", ISBN-10: 1542866502.

For Emacs there is already org-journal and dailies in org-roam.

Yeah well, every muggle has to go through seven circles of note-taking hell before discovering Org-mode. Nobody gets magic for free.

I'm journalling with Aider these days.

it's a nice hackery thing to do, but i am too old and tired to use it hehe, i prefer my todo.txt

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