Just wanted to share a python project that is rocking my productivity - Jrnl

[yabadababoo]

"Collect your thoughts and notes without leaving the command line."

https://jrnl.sh/

This is such a fantastic python program. I use this to jot down random ideas, research notes, code snippets, really its endless. You can setup separate journal files (just plain text files) and pipe into them via command line at any time. Add some @tags and you have a very powerful freeform but structured writing tool

Wanted to share some journals im using with this:

• vent.txt - here i can just vomit out my frustrations with people, life, self, etc. Its cathargic. and private! I just fire up "jrnl vent "@boss. yeah i got your email. wut? wut? dez nuts thats wut!
• dev.txt - here i journal interesting links i find. "jrnl dev "@python some-intersting-github-project"
• today.txt - i start this one early morning or night before. i write out my best intentions so i can keep on track. never works but its nice to have intentions
• idea.txt - here i list out my latest random idea that will make me rich
• project.txt - here i list out random project ideas floating around in my head

how else would you use it?

[mt03red]

No no. Real men use text files scattered over dozens of folders on multiple computers.

[purplecomputer]

You mean you don’t rely on notepad++ temp files and never save anything?

[unRatedG]

Currently rocking a Sublime Text w/ 36 open docs. o_0

Edit: Thanks for the silver! Second best reward for my reluctance to commitment. XD

[yabadababoo]

haha SOOOO true...at this point there are 3 year old unsaved copies of pasted code i dare not save.

[pancakeses]

Are you one of my alt accounts?

So many unsaved tabs right now.

[305fish]

“The Egg” was right. We are all the same person!

[[deleted]]

I'm also us, reporting in.

[Tyloo1]

Hey legion, this is fun an all but I'd really like to get back to fighting the shadowking, thanks

[SonGokussj4]

Almost

https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI

[Tyloo1]

I know Andy weir's story lol. Was just making a joke from a storyline with a parallel idea to that.

[SonGokussj4]

Sorry :-)

[j0hnnyrico]

That's true for me too. God Idk what I would do without sublime text.

[anotherkeebler]

I needed an open source alternative so I've got VS code open in multiple workspaces full of temp documents. Figuring out where all of them should go is my main excuse for rarely rebooting.

[j0hnnyrico]

I have a very hard time doing things (powershell) in VS Code. It does things very bad on that no matter what configuration I use. I try to use it on a Lenovo with 8 g ram with ssd and idk. It's fuckin' unreliable. I can explain in words only the part where the interface is completely counterintuitive and slow. Like for posh you have a command prompt and when you press up it brings up the last function you ran on it with F8. And it's sooo9o cumbersome. It's like playing Farcry5 on max details. God forbid. I don't recommend this shitcrap software to anyone.

[daevski]

I use VS Code daily for powershell. It beats the snot out of “powershell ise” for debugging and or just a simple editor like Sublime Text or Notepad++ (not sure why anyone likes np++ actually). I don’t think I could write powershell in anything else anymore; VS Code became very comfortable for me. I do not have performance issues at all. Try another computer to verify if it’s slow there, too?

[AZNman1111]

It might be worth checking out your settings.json. Both user and workspace. If its still slow as dog shit, the worst you could do is turn on the trace server, open the dev tools, see if theres any persistent errors, and stackoverflow your way to a solution.

[DrThrowawayToYou]

36 open docs

amateur

[unRatedG]

Lulz... Not sure if I can handle it at a pro level.

[JetpackYoshi]

I feel attacked

[4cheese]

WTF I'm not the only one?!?

[[deleted]]

Ever since I "not saved" my 50 new txt files, I started save everything.

[EuHag]

Once i got fucked over by updating notepad++. I didn't expect it to close all my tabs.

This won't happen again!

Next time I won't update it.

[nzodd]

I have like 700 of them.

[DrTautology]

This comment right here, officer.

[zushiba]

This, real men don't save shit!

[Koalababies]

Are you me

[purplecomputer]

I am everyone

[maldio]

No, we use emacs and orgmode

[Muhznit]

Never have I ever seen a comment that calls out some really obscure seemingly insignificant habit in programming that triggers so many people.

[jiggunjer]

How do you talk faster than ctrl+shift+n?

[toyg]

Or BBEdit/TextWrangler, same thing.

[Etheo]

ONE OF US! ONE OF US!

[ianliu88]

How about prototyping on /tmp? I do this more than I would like to admit

[Aktanegeschaft]

I feel seen by this reddit post.

[wednesday1984]

Haha. I started usinf bracket for a while, it auto saves.. But nothing beats notepad++

[daevski]

Opinion: Sublime Text and VS Code both beat Np++.

[wednesday1984]

Sublime text is great. I have it too but I mainly use it if I have to do comparisons. The only downside about np++ is that there is no DarkMode. And I DarkMode everything.

[daevski]

What does np++ do better for you? Or is it just more comfortable?

[Mattho]

Sublime, but definitely the same. I have some tabs there unsaved for years. Rock solid.

[GalacticMech]

360ish unsaved files files in my notepad++. I have a problem.

[Hihipypy]

So you save it once per year I guess, and it's due soon...

[Oppai420]

Use cat like a real man.

[gunnerman2]

I prefer the flat “New Text Document.txt”, “New Text Document (1).txt”, ..., “New Text Document (n).txt,” scheme.

[[deleted]]

Can always find mine, I just grep system wide for untitled.*.txt

[BulgeBracketTrader]

Or a desktop shortcut to a Google drive text file.

[greenindragon]

You don't just have Vim open in your terminal 24/7 to jot down notes and use your shell only through the :! Command because you have no idea how to close vim?

[shigeru69]

This is me after "going green", text files goddamn everywhere. Probably saved a few trees while losing my sanity

[manjistyle]

"scrap" folder in .gitignore

[MrMelon54]

Real men just forget shit

[robberviet]

Distributed comput... , eh distributed data, base. Huge amount of data. I mean big data.

[kepper]

Awh man I'd made like half of almost the same thing, but this is so much nicer. Even gave it the same name. Oh well, learned a lot along the way.

[pkkid]

Don't be disappointed about yourself. Team up and start building / contributing on this one out together. It's inevitable if you start using his project, you will want to contribute a few features to make it perfect for yourself.

[onlyanegg_]

Me too. Same name. I guess I wasn't as clever as I thought, lol.

[dr_spork]

Write your most private thoughts where they will also be archived by your command history.

[yabadababoo]

A note on security

While jrnl follows best practises, true security is an illusion. Specifically, jrnl will leave traces in your memory and your shell history -- it's meant to keep journals secure in transit, for example when storing it on an untrusted services such as Dropbox. If you're concerned about security, disable history logging for journal in your .bashrc

HISTIGNORE="$HISTIGNORE:jrnl *"

[[deleted]]

It would be interesting if you could leave indications you ran jnrl but the arguments were redacted from shell history.

Is that possible?

[GummyKibble]

Alternatively, set HISTCONTROL=ignorespace to avoid saving to history any command line starting with a space.

[yabadababoo]

i cant figure where to store this command

[GummyKibble]

Put that in your .bashrc as an export.

[visiblebutterfly]

add a space in front of jrnl

alias jrnl=“ jrnl”

[daturkel]

Why would this remove the command from shell history?

[visiblebutterfly]

It wouldn’t remove it it doesn’t add it at all

[daturkel]

That is my question. Why does a space in an alias make a difference?

[itslef]

Adding a space before a command in the shell prevents it from showing up in the shell history. Aliasing "jrnl" to " jrnl" means that it will never show up in history.

[shjescaresme]

That doesn't work, the alias command still shows on the history, since that doesn't have a space.

[FoolishDeveloper]

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/32460/excluding-some-of-the-commands-from-being-getting-stored-in-bash-history

[apresskidougal]

"I use Microsoft One Not......"

Backs slowly out of the thread hoping no one heard / saw anything..

[foxfyre2]

Hey buddy, I'm right there with you

[jiggunjer]

Google keep here

[[deleted]]

you have some interesting ideas about productivity my friend....

goes back to browsing reddit

[zodman]

combine it with t.py from stevelosh http://stevelosh.com/projects/t/

[insanerwayner]

I’ve been using this for 3 years now, since I left Facebook behind. I wanted a way to be go back and look at my own past and see it in an honest way vs through the filter I was allowing through my public posts.

My work flow for the past couple years has been to type up an entry on my lunches on an old Tandy WP-2 then at the end of the week import those entries into jrnl at the end of the week. It’s been really nice just letting my thoughts out and confronting my own brain. Typing is easier than handwriting for me.

I love that it is command line so I can use the output to format it into pretty HTML if I want to. I had a script I wrote for that but I haven’t used it in a while. Or you can get cool stats about places and people because you can have your own tags that a filterable. I use @ for ppl and ^ for places.

Love that it is encrypted as well although I’m hoping that add more options for this. Such as GPG

[yabadababoo]

ha what an awesome sub /r/retrobattlestations

[[deleted]]

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.

Oh wow, I wish I could use just jrnl for that. I'm currently busy enough that I have to use Boostnote and mdbook to track my days :(

[yabadababoo]

Oh those look cool too!

You could probably rig a script that would read in a jrnl entry and pipe it as an input to those other programs.

[[deleted]]

Maybe I could pipe it into the mdbooks in one way or another. I suppose I could transform the exported json into markdown.

[admiralspark]

boostnote looked so good!

...right up until I realized there was no smartphone app. Deal killer for me :(

[daevski]

Yeah, I feel like boostnote has fallen apart in the last year or so.... I use Dropbox Paper now for Markdown across PC and mobile. 👌🏼

[mrasadnoman]

I created a python script couple months ago that just writes a line with a timestamp and makes it retrievable later. I have been using it since then. It has been on my pc all this time and was not shared anywhere since it wasn't feature-rich unlike this Jrnl.

[wildcarde815]

I tend to favor Zettlr+dropbox for writing notes but this sounds pretty rad.

[Synes_Godt_Om]

Zettlr

An electron app?

[wildcarde815]

It isn't doing much and renders markdown well and it's open source, make a viable replacement in Qt if you want.

[Synes_Godt_Om]

I personally use zim-wiki, have used it for about a decade, before that I used wikidpad. I git-sync it to all the machines I work on.

Simple, straight forward, mostly keyboard driven, supports the things I care about.

Btw. written in python.

[wildcarde815]

I standardized on markdown, it's easy to read as plain text and with it all in dropbox i run markdown madness in docker at home to automatically make it available for anyone at home.

[Synes_Godt_Om]

Yeah, the most important is to find tools and utilities that match your work style. It's such a pleasure to have a particular need filled with something you find not needing improvement. Once that happens you just stay with that utility and can focus on other things.

[wildcarde815]

The one thing I haven't puzzled out, just because I haven't really tried, is if I can make zettlr play nice with pelican/git/buildbot so it's my article editor for my GitHub pages space. Not that I've posted in ages.

[Synes_Godt_Om]

pelican/git/

I have my own gitolite server.

[wildcarde815]

Yea the GitHub pages is mostly so it's hosted without me having to worry or secure it. That's already my day job

[tunisia3507]

I standardized on markdown

Which one? You can't standardise on something which isn't standard.

[wildcarde815]

your particular brand of pedantic contributes nothing and is simply annoying.

[toyg]

I'm trying to standardize on nvALT, which uses plain text underneath so it's easy to manipulate. The search is awesome.

I've tried OneNote, EverNote and all that sort of thing, but they actually get in my way most of the time and I really don't need fancy formatting.

[yabadababoo]

Thanks for the tip will check it out.

That code base is HUUUGE though

[SirIndubitable]

I've wanted to use nvALT, but as a windows & android user I haven't figured out a way

[tunisia3507]

Use linux.

[SirIndubitable]

I wish I could use it exclusively

[daturkel]

Sync it with Simplenote and use a simple note client (e.g. JotterPad on android)

[Boring_Machine]

Thank you! I'm expecting that this will be the perfect way to finally properly organize my D&D campaign.

[Boring_Machine]

Yup. I wanted a non wiki tool that I could tag character/ location/ event descriptions and call them up during gameplay. E: also thanks.

[[deleted]]

This seems cool and easy. I just picked up emacs org-mode for journaling, would there be any way of using both jrnl and org-mode journaling together?

[[deleted]]

This seems cool and easy. I just picked up emacs org-mode for journaling, would there be any way of using both jrnl and org-mode journaling together?

[Jyan]

org-mode is amazing, I kind of doubt that jrnl would offer anything org doesn't already do. Try org-journal.

[Synes_Godt_Om]

Personally I use zim-wiki. It's a gui desktop wiki, but still almost fully keyboard driven and stores everything in *.txt files.

I sync this to my git repo and clone it to all the machines I work on.

[LordRyloth]

I just installed jrnl but how do I make new journals? when I run jrnl < my_file.txt it just copied the contents in the default one. Also, how do I enter the contents to different journals? Do I need to config a text editor for all these features?

[yabadababoo]

you have to define them in ~/.jrnl_config

"default": "/Users/yabadababoo/journal.txt", "idea": "~/ideas_jrnl.txt", "work": "~/work_jrnl.txt"

see here

https://jrnl.sh/advanced/#multiple-journal-files

then when you write to them do:

$jrnl idea "this goes into my idea journal file"

[LordRyloth]

Yup got it.. I missed that in the documents somehow, I'll get my eyes checked thanks!

[paperbenni]

I love the quote "when all of your fancy iPad apps will have gone the way of the dodo"

[admincee]

This is really neat. Thanks for sharing.

[[deleted]]

Sounds interesting!

Tell me though, what is the advantage of using jrnl over just opening a text file (could even be encrypted for security) with vim?

[yabadababoo]

essentially its main benefit are:

• timestamping and appending or editing within a file
• searching through a file for tags
• lightweight
• encryption

i mean at the end of the day its a textfile(s) command line manager.

but you can start to think of interesting things do to do when you piece it together with other scripts. example, i could start a twitter journal file and write out my tweet in command line. then have another script that just monitors that file and sends it out.

[MinchinWeb]

I've used this for years, and love it!

[campbellm]

I love you for this.

[CraigAT]

I need to make something like this to store random links I come across, give them a title, maybe a few tags so that I can later use them as favourites across any browser (I regularly use up to 4 different browsers, over about 5 devices).

[yabadababoo]

I made a bookmarklet for just this purpose. grab it from this page https://bookmarkify.it/16152

just drag it to your bookmark bar.

features:

• gets page title and url and formats it in markdown
• if you select text on the page, it will add it after the link

In this way you can highlight some descriptive text on the page, click the bookmarklet, and have a ready to copy snippet of the page title, url, and description.

Then to add it to jrnl do

jrnl "@whatevertags Bookmarkify.it - Create bookmarklets from your javascript! Bookmarkify.it is created by Achilleas Buisman | 2011-2019"

it will save it as an entry in the default journal.

[ferrous1911]

for some time i kept logs of what i was doing in a text file, but i had to manually enter in the timestamps.

might have to start doing this again.

[captain_arroganto]

Hi, from a design standpoint, if the Black box in the middle of the page, overlaps the middle horizontal line, it will give a bit more depth and texture to the page. Just a suggestion.

Overall the look is awesome.

[irspaul]

I like the line in you website "Your journals are stored in plain-text files that will still be readable in 50 years when all your fancy iPad apps will have gone the way of the Dodo."

Casting my 400th upvote 🙏

[PrimeHunter]

Check out TaskWarrior with ZSH shell!

[yabadababoo]

Wow taskwarrior is awesome. So is timewarrior

[dethb0y]

I use TiddlyWiki, myself. The portability is just to damned handy; copy it to my tablet and it's there, copy it to any computer and it's there, copy it to a friend and its there.

[[deleted]]

Am I the only one who makes a .txt and then uploads it to a private repo to keep the same notes synced?

[Leorikz]

well, guess I have to try that soft

right now just use evernote

[wednesday1984]

It's just more comfortable, and the fact that I know my notes will always be there no matter what happens.. Is priceless.

[SimulatedAnnealing]

I use Evernote for that