Diary

A simple app written in Golang to log your day-to-day activities

Configuration

Copy .diary.yaml.example to your home directory to configure the location of the database. Without this, your diary will always write to the current directory. This means that your entries might end up in different places and you won't realize it.

Known issue: directory expansion (such as using ~ for the home directory or enviroment variables) does not work and will be treated as literal characters.

Usage

After building, run either diary.exe on Windows or diary on MacOS or Linux. Running without any commands will provide the available options.

For all commands that you input data in (learn, log, and mistake), input can either be passed in right on the command line, or the command can be run interactively. The two commands are equivalent.

Non-interactive:

./diary learn The cake is a lie
Recorded: The cake is a lie

Interactive:

./diary learn
What did you learn? The cake is a lie
Recorded: The cake is a lie

Tracking What You've Learned

The learn command is used for tracking interesting facts you learned today.

Tracking What You're Doing

The log command is used for tracking what you currently are doing.

Tracking Your Mistakes

The mistake command is used for tracking mistakes you've made so you can learn from them.

If you've got a bit more of a pottymouth, there's an alias for you to track your f***ups.

What Did You Do Today?

The today command gives you a Markdown-formatted list of everything entered for today.

Time Travelling

For all commands, the following options can be passed on the command line to add entries for a previous day:

  -d, --date string       Use a specific date (--time is required with this)
  -t, --time string       Use a specific time

For example ./diary log -t 13:50 logs an entry at 1:50pm local time, and ./diary today -d 2022-02-28 gets you your log entries for February 28th, 2022.

Shell Aliases

To make interacting with diary easier for you, consider the following aliases in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc (diary is located at ~/scripts/diary, but this can be changed with the q alias:

alias yesterday='date -v-1d +%F'

alias q='~/scripts/diary'
alias qm='q mistake'
alias qe='q learn'
alias ql='q log'
alias qly='ql --date=$(yesterday) -t'
alias qt='q today'
alias qty='qt --date=$(yesterday)'

Building

go get github.com/b-turchyn/diary
cd $(go env GOPATH)/src/github.com/b-turchyn/diary
go build

FAQ

Q: Why build this?
A: Because I wanted to experiment with Golang more.
Q: Aren't there better ways to track this?
A: Almost certainly.
Q: Isn't a text file just as good?
A: Probably.
Q: Should I use this program?
A: Up to you. If you live on the command line, then a few aliases set up makes this pretty convenient. Otherwise, it's probably not for you.