jrnl

jrnl is a simple journal application for your command line. Journals are stored as human readable plain text files - you can put them into a Dropbox folder for instant syncinc and you can be assured that your journal will still be readable in 2050, when all your fancy iPad journal applications will long be forgotten.

Optionally, your journal can be encrypted using the 256-bit AES.

Why keep a journal?

Journals aren't only for 13-year old girls and people who have too much time on their summer vacation. A journal helps you to keep track of the things you get done and how you did them. Your imagination may be limitless, but your memory isn't. For personal use, make it a good habit to write at least 20 words a day. Just to reflect what made this day special, why you haven't wasted it. For professional use, consider a text-based journal to be the perfect complement to your GTD todo list - a documentation of what and how you've done it.

In a Nutshell

to make a new entry, just type

jrnl yesterday: Called in sick. Used the time to clean the house and spent 4h on writing my book.

and hit return. yesterday: will be interpreted as a timestamp. Everything until the first sentence mark (.?!) will be interpreted as the title, the rest as the body. In your journal file, the result will look like this:

2012-03-29 09:00 Called in sick. 
Used the time to clean the house and spent 4h on writing my book.

If you just call jrnl, you will be prompted to compose your entry - but you can also configure jrnl to use your external editor.

Usage

jrnl has to modes: composing and viewing.

Viewing:

jrnl -n 10

will list you the ten latest entries,

jrnl -from "last year" -to march

everything that happened from the start of last year to the start of last march. If you only want to see the titles of your entries, use

jrnl -short

Using Tags:

Keep track of people, projects or locations, by tagging them with an @ in your entries:

jrnl Had a wonderful day on the #beach with @Tom and @Anna.

You can filter your journal entries just like this:

jrnl @pinkie @WorldDomination

Will print all entries in which either @pinkie or @WorldDomination occurred.

jrnl -n 5 -and @pineapple @lubricant

the last five entries containing both @pineapple and @lubricant. You can change which symbols you'd like to use for tagging in the configuration.

Note: jrnl @pinkie @WorldDomination will switch to viewing mode because although now command line arguments are given, all the input strings look like tags - jrnl will assume you want to filter by tag.

Smart timestamps:

Timestamps that work:

at 6am
yesterday
last monday
sunday at noon
2 march 2012
7 apr
5/20/1998 at 23:42

Installation

You can install jrnl manually by cloning the repository:

git clone git://github.com/maebert/jrnl.git
cd jrnl
python setup.py install

or by using pip:

pip install jrnl

Afterwards, you may want to create an alias in your .bashrc or .bash_profile or whatever floats your shell:

alias jrnl="jrnl.py"

Known Issues

jrnl relies on the Crypto package to encrypt journals, which has some known problems in automatically installing within virtual environments.

Advanced usage

The first time launched, jrnl will create a file called .jrnl_config in your home directory.

.jrnl_config

It's just a regular json file:

{
    journal:        "~/journal.txt",
    editor:         "",
    encrypt:        false,
    password:       ""
    tagsymbols:     '@'
    default_hour:   9,
    default_minute: 0,
    timeformat:     "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M",
    highlight:      true
}

journal: path to your journal file
editor: if set, executes this command to launch an external editor for writing your entries, e.g. vim or subl -w (note the -w flag to make sure jrnl waits for Sublime Text to close the file before writing into the journal).
encrypt: if true, encrypts your journal using AES.
password: you may store the password you used to encrypt your journal in plaintext here. This is useful if your journal file lives in an unsecure space (ie. your Dropbox), but the config file itself is more or less safe.
tagsymbols: Symbols to be interpreted as tags. (See note below)
default_hour and default_minute: if you supply a date, such as last thursday, but no specific time, the entry will be created at this time
timeformat: how to format the timestamps in your journal, see the python docs for reference
highlight: if true and you have clint installed, tags will be highlighted in cyan.

Note on tagsymbols: Although it seems intuitive to use the # character for tags, there's a drawback: on most shells, this is interpreted as a meta-character starting a comment. This means that if you type
jrnl Implemented endless scrolling on the #frontend of our website.
your bash will chop off everything after the # before passing it to jrnl). To avoid this, wrap your input into quotation marks like this:
jrnl "Implemented endless scrolling on the #frontend of our website."
Or use the built-in prompt or an external editor to compose your entries.

JSON export

Can do:

jrnl --json

Why not create a beautiful timeline of your journal?

Tag export

With

jrnl --tags

you'll get a list of all tags you used in your journal, sorted by most frequent. Tags occuring several times in the same entry are only counted as one.

Markdown export

jrnl --markdown

Markdown is a simple markup language that is human readable and can be used to be rendered to other formats (html, pdf). This README for example is formatted in markdown and github makes it look nice.

Encryption

You can encrypt your existing journal file or change its password using

jrnl --encrypt

If it is already encrypted, you will first be asked for the current password. You can then enter a new password and your plain journal will replaced by the encrypted file. Conversely,

jrnl --decrypt

will replace your encrypted journal file by a Journal in plain text.

Should you ever want to decrypt your journal manually, you can do so with any program that supports the AES algorithm. The key used for encryption is the SHA-256-hash of your password, and the IV (initialisation vector) is stored in the first 16 bytes of the encrypted file. So, to decrypt a journal file in python, run

import hashlib, Crypto.Cipher
key = hashlib.sha256(my_password).digest()
with open("my_journal.txt") as f:
    cipher = f.read()
    crypto = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_CBC, iv = cipher[:16])
    plain = crypto.decrypt(cipher[16:])

stunsch/jrnl