org-journal.el

Adapted from http://www.emacswiki.org/PersonalDiary

Functions to maintain a simple personal diary / journal in Emacs. Feel free to use, modify and improve the code! — mtvoid, bastibe

_BREAKING CHANGE_

Org-journal used to use the key bindings C-c j, C-c b, and C-c f. These however are reserved for user-defined actions. Instead, org-journal now uses C-c C-j, C-c C-b and C-c C-f. This can lead to conflicts with other modes. Please (global-set-key (kbd "C-c j") 'org-journal-new-entry) if this bothers you.

This file is also available from marmalade, melpa and melpa-stable under the name org-journal. You may also want to specify the directory where your journal files will be saved. You can do this by setting the variable org-journal-dir (remember to add a trailing slash). org-journal-dir is also a customizable variable. The default value for org-journal-dir is ~/Documents/journal/.

You can add all those calendar files to your org-agenda by adding org-journal-dir to org-agenda-files and setting org-agenda-file-regexp to include files with an all-numeric name (\\`[^.].*\\.org'\\|[0-9]+). That way, you can use org-agenda to search for TODO items or tagged items in your org-journal.

A better way to search journal items is to use org-journal’s built-in search functionality by Vladimir Kazanov. All searches are kicked off from the calendar, and search different date ranges for a keyword: f w to search the current week, f m for the current month, f y for the current year, and f f for all journal files. Use org-journal-search to search entries in a custom date range.

Inside the journal directory, a separate file is created for each day with a journal entry, with a file name in the format YYYYMMDD. Each journal entry is an org-mode file that begins with a date entry on the top, followed by a entries for different times. Any subsequent entries on the same day are written as additional headings in the same file, with their own time. To start writing a journal entry, press C-c C-j. You can also open the current day’s entry without adding a new entry with C-u C-c C-j.

You can customize the date and time formats using the variables org-journal-date-format and org-journal-time-format. If you do not want to use org headings and sub-headings for date and time entries, customize org-journal-date-prefix and org-journal-time-prefix. For example, you could set org-journal-date-prefix to #+TITLE: in order to begin every file with a title instead of a heading. If you want to store your journal entries with different file names, customize org-journal-file-format.

You can browse through existing journal entries on disk via the calendar. All dates for which an entry is present are highlighted. Pressing j will open it up for viewing. Pressing C-j will open it for viewing, but not switch to it. Pressing [ or ] will select the date with the previous or next journal entry, respectively. Pressing i j will create a new entry for the chosen date.

Quick summary:

To create a new journal entry: C-c C-j
To open today’s journal without creating a new entry: C-u C-c C-j

In calendar view:

j to view an entry in a new buffer
C-j to view an entry but not switch to it
i j to add a new entry
f w to search in all entries of the current week
f m to search in all entries of the current month
f y to search in all entries of the current year
f f to search in all entries of all time
[ to go to previous entry
] to go to next entry

When viewing a journal entry:

C-c C-f to view next entry
C-c C-b to view previous entry

A typical journal entry for a day would look like this:

(it will actually look a lot nicer, depending on your org-mode settings)

* Tuesday, 06/04/13
** 10:28 Company meeting
Endless discussions about projects. Not much progress

** 11:33 Work on org-journal                                   :org-journal:
For the longest time, I wanted to have a cool diary app on my
computer. However, I simply lacked the right tool for that job. After
many hours of searching, I finally found PersonalDiary on EmacsWiki.
PersonalDiary is a very simple diary system based on the emacs
calendar. It works pretty well, but I don't really like that it only
uses unstructured text.

Thus, I spent the last two hours with making that diary use org-mode
and represent every entry as an org-mode headline. Very cool!

** 15:33 Work on org-journal                                   :org-journal:
Now my journal automatically creates the right headlines (adds the
current time stamp if on the current day, does not add a time stamp
for any other day). Additionally, it automatically collapses the
headlines in the org-file to the right level (shows everything if in
view mode, shows only headlines in new-entry-mode). Emacs and elisp
are really cool!

** 16:40 Work on org-journal                                   :org-journal:
I uploaded my journal mode to marmalade and Github! Awesome!

** TODO teach org-journal how to brew coffee                   :org-journal:

Changelog

2013-06-04 V1.0 Bastian Bechtold: Initial working prototype. More or less simply an extension of personal-diary with org-mode files.
2013-06-12 V1.3.4 Bastian Bechtold: Several bug fixes and documentation improvements.
2013-08-23 V1.4 Bastian Bechtold: Now supports more customization
2013-09-17 V1.4.3 Bastian Bechtold: Several bugfixes and autoloading (which kind of mostly works)
2013-10-02 V1.4.4 Bastian Bechtold: Create org-journal directory if not present (thank you, Donghyun Cho!)
2013-11-10 V1.4.8 Bastian Bechtold: Fixed opening of journal files for reading (thank you, Matthew M. Keeler!) View mode now stays active when switching between files (thank you, Matthew M. Keeler!) Some autoload fixes
2014-03-10 V1.4.8 Bastian Bechtold: Some bug fixes on opening files (thank you, Ram Raghunathan!)
2014-06-17 V1.5 Bastian Bechtold: Some more bug fixes for autoloading Simplified setup by auto generating the file pattern from the file format.
2014-11-19 V1.6 Bastian Bechtold: Changed default key bindings to comply with Emacs’ standards.
2014-08-12 V1.6.2 Bastian Bechtold: Added prefix argument to open-current-entry (thank you, Vladimir Kazanov!)
2014-08-12 V1.6.3 Bastian Bechtold: Added key binding for viewing but not switching to entry (thank you, Vladimir Kazanov!)
2014-17-12 V1.6.4 Bastian Bechtold: Journal files should open correctly when restored by desktop-save-mode now.
2015-03-01 V1.7.0 Bastian Bechtold: Added functions for searching journal entries in date ranges (thank you, Vladimir Kazanov!).
2015-05-04 V1.8.0 Bastian Bechtold: No more empty files when creating new entries with prefix (thank you, Vladimir Kazanov!).
You can now customize whether org-journal-mode will hide entries (thank you, Boris Buliga!).
2015-06-22 V1.9.0 Bastian Bechtold: Journal files can now be encrypted if you set org-journal-enable-encryption (thank you, Donghyun Cho and Puneeth Chaganti!).
2015-07-01 V1.9.1 Bastian Bechtold: Encryption and prefix now work for calendar-created entries (thank you, Puneeth Chaganti!).

larkery/org-journal

org-journal.el

Changelog