I really love this. One nit I must pick, however, is with the "just-so" nature of the journal screenshots. I see something similar in pinterest-style "bullet journal"/habit tracking colourful journal layouts (example[0]). Specifically, these look nice (or work) only if your to-do list is just so, usually fairly short and with really short items on it. So the "demo" versions of these have mocked up content which fits vs. real content, which is frequently less uniform.
In this article, you'll see the demo content is a lot of "buy apples" and "make apple pie," but note that no to-do items exceed 18 characters which is the maximum length to fit nicely in that layout. So if you need to "buy turkey baster" (18c) you're OK, but if you need to "return turkey baster" (21c) you've overflowed the layout. Likewise, you can "call Alexander" (15c) but "send thank you card to alexander and elizabeth" (46c) is way over budget, and you'll need to mutilate it down to "ty card alex&beth" (18c) to fit. This leads, in the example, to shortening items to something like "shopping trip," at which point too much context is lost (what if you have a second shopping trip?).
Likewise, if you want to dump all the todos you can think of for the week and it's 20 or 30 small items, it's not clear that would work well in these layouts.
This is not to malign this system which I think is really cool, but to suggest that it's more useful to see real and more varied content in a system like this to see how it "really looks" rather than exclusively made-to-measure content of 1-6 super-short items per list.
I agree. I suspect with some level of curmudgeonness that it's because author calls themself a pixel-artist. I have a brutalist CLI/programmer take on bullet journalling from vim, just for comparison:
The code at https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html doesn't work for me. It looks like it is passing vim the -d args, which doesn't seem right since -d opens a diff view. I think you misplaced a comma for the date command. I fixed it for me by doing like this:
function journal() {
vim $logdir/$(date +%Y-%m-%d -d "$\*")
}
I do something similar, but switched from bash/vim/markdown to Joplin a while back. I lost the immediacy of bash, but seamless syncing and editing across multiple devices, especially mobile, made it worth it.
The main thing is that Joplin is still markdown, and I can trivially export if I want to switch to something else.
Highly recommend nb[0] for this type of stuff. I've been using it for a few years now and am still getting surprised by all the stuff it can do.
Some others have said it but the only problem with a lot of these systems is that by their very nature they are a better experience on a desktop than on mobile. Joplin is the only one I've used that even attempts to solve that problem. Even when you have one that works on mobile its a second class experience IMO. I used to try really hard to find a note capture system that I loved that worked in both environments. These days I just use apple notes on mobile and nb on desktop.
In terms of “just giving up and taking simple mobile notes” I can also endorse Google Keep iOS - natural affordances match my typical eng/Phil related use cases better than Apple notes.
I used keep for a bit. I liked it and agree it does the same thing apple notes does. I settled on apple notes for no other reason than a weird sense of minimalism if that makes sense. I've installed so many note apps over the years that I was spending more time on that than actually using something. I decided enough was enough. Apple notes has flaws (especially if you use other platforms) but they all do. I got tired of worrying about it and just decided to go all in warts and all.
NB syncs via git. It’s automatic once you point it at a remote origin.
I don’t even try to access via mobile. You can but it’s a second class experience. I just use Apple notes and transfer anything I care about over to nb about once a week or so.
You probably can get a mobile thing going w Joplin or obsidian but it would require a little bit of scripting to get nb to pick up any new notes you create as it relies upon .index files at the root of each directory to know it’s contents instead of doing I/O operations. I assume this is for performance reasons.
That does look cool. Would this work fine if presented with my Obsidian "vault", eg a folder full of markdown files? Looks like both apps like to operate on the same data.
I've used obsidian with nb before but you can't just open nb inside your vault and have it immediately work. nb uses .index files at the root of each directory to know what to display in the cli (I assume so it doesn't have to do a ton of I/O operations). You'd probably need to spend a bit of time understanding that stuff so you can write up a script or something to coordinate between the two. I ultimately just ditched obsidian and went with my afore mentioned apple notes/nb hybrid approach.
I've been using this for years, it doesn't have any fancy features - it only reliably opens up/create today's diary in vim whenever I type `diary` in command line. with some minor utilities.
It is life changing - having `diary` where I can type my thoughts into whenever. I maintain a separate one both for work and life - and both are proving invaluable.
This is an interesting way to do this. I've been using Sublime lately and it's been okay but I need some organization. Does this allow something like "diary [name] [text] where you can add text to any diary with that name and if there is none it creates a new one? I will look at this in more detail next weekend when I am off from work.
It looks through the folder (i.e. year/month/date.md) and try to find whether today's diary exist. If it does exist it just opens it, otherwise it creates it.
The script actually accept other terminal editors if you edit a single line in the package. I imagine it will be easy to change to use sublime as well.
Whenever I see systems like this I am left wondering what people do on mobile? Are you never in the need to write a note or create a task when you're away from the computer?
I use a small notebook and Fisher Space Pen. To be honest, it just feels more comfortable with the way my brain is wired. I tend to remember things better when I write instead of type, and I jotva lot of stuff in the margins as thoughts start to flow, where others might find note-taking apps more suited to their style. It really just depends on how you process information.
I'm the same way but I use a hobonichi journal with a frixion erasable ink pen. It flows much smoother. I used to use a moleskine with fisher pen but I kept having to go over lines again. Maybe it works better in space.
I have an Obsidian vault synced using Synthing. At first I thought that Android would kill the Syncthing background process all the time, but it's been fine so far (I do have to launch Synching manually after restarting my phone).
I don't use any of Obsidian's fancy features, apart from tags and the occasional note link (so that I don't have to copy-paste a reference from another note).
I use the "daily note" feature if I want to jot something down quickly. I then formalise it later and when I'm at my computer, I check in the markdown files into git with a script that modifies the timestamps of the commit(s) to match the last-modified date of the files I'm checking in. This is so that I can know exactly when I wrote down a note, so that I can correlate the commit with other records like my browser history.
I switched to Joplin for this reason. I used to use git + text editor, but it's not the best experience on Android, and seemingly near impossible on iOS.
As much as I love the idea of them I've found systems like these never quite work for me in the real world. There's always a ticketing system for my employer where that stuff lives, and for personal stuff I absolutely need first class mobile support because that's generally the device I have with me when I remember something I need to do.
After many years I've eventually landed on using [work ticket tracker] for work tracking, Apple Reminders for todo lists which are rarely complex items, and Logseq for journaling. My journal really is just that, I rarely go back to previous entries, but I find it helpful to spend a bit of time each day just noting down what I did and how I felt about it. I sometimes joke that this is my insurance policy in case the Police knock on my door and ask me what I did on the 12th of March this year.
I arrived at exactly the same conclusion, but I use Notes for my todo list (I like mixing checklists and notes in one document) and leaving reminders for… you know, reminders.
I honestly enjoy it less than some of the more complex plain text systems I’ve used/built in the past but it has the advantage of actually being practical for me.
> We can clean this up with “abbreviations” (:h abbreviations):
It’s probably almost a decade since I last used an abbreviation; I consistently found I just didn’t quite like them, and migrated to other ways of doing things. It was digraphs at first, still a Vim feature, and then Compose key sequences, which is where I’ve stayed ever since, preferring them mostly because they work everywhere, not just Vim. Now I type apostrophes, quotation marks, dashes, and other interesting things as I go perfectly casually, and would hate to be without a Compose key. (I’ve typed every non-ASCII character in this comment with my Compose key—just as well I still remembered · even though I practically never use it any more.)
> You can use x and o as well, but × (U+00D7, MULTIPLICATION SIGN) and · (U+00B7, MIDDLE DOT) are more … gourmet.
I’d go more gourmet than that: I use • (U+2022 BULLET) and ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2713 CHECK MARK) for lists. If you really wanted a cross, you could also go with ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2717 BALLOT X). The ordering holds, either way: 0x2022 < 0x2713, though I cringe at unbridled sorting of these lines.
(I do all my own writing in a lightweight markup language I’ve been developing, one property of which is that it leans on CSS Counter Styles for lists for spectacular matching of source and compiled result, so that you can write “(i) ”, “17. ”, “• ”, “‹CHECK MARK› ”, &c. and get matching appearance in the HTML output—or will, when I finally get round to finishing the parser and implementing HTML conversion. I write lists with mingled •, and bullets and it’s great.)
Anyway: back to the abbreviations matter: you could also enter all these characters with digraphs (CTRL-K …) or Compose key sequences (Compose …, but since your keyboard lacks a Compose key you’ll need to map one—I use RAlt on my current laptop because that’s conveniently positioned, but I really wish my spacebar was just split into at least three keys):
• · is digraph .M or ~. and Compose sequence .- or .^ or ^.
• × is digraph *X or /\ and Compose sequence xx
• • is digraph oo and Compose sequence .=
• ‹CHECK MARK› is digraph OK and a popular Compose sequence is @/ (present in kragen’s list, as included out of the box by WinCompose, but not standard on other platforms)
• ‹BALLOT X› is digraph XX and a popular Compose sequence is @X
You can define your own Vim digraphs too (:digraph), and make your own ~/.XCompose to set your own Compose sequences.
I use vim, git, and a very simple set of bash aliases to do bullet journalling in vim. I have since 2013. No frills, no fuss, no formatting limitations... easy to copy / change.
Readit News
In this article, you'll see the demo content is a lot of "buy apples" and "make apple pie," but note that no to-do items exceed 18 characters which is the maximum length to fit nicely in that layout. So if you need to "buy turkey baster" (18c) you're OK, but if you need to "return turkey baster" (21c) you've overflowed the layout. Likewise, you can "call Alexander" (15c) but "send thank you card to alexander and elizabeth" (46c) is way over budget, and you'll need to mutilate it down to "ty card alex&beth" (18c) to fit. This leads, in the example, to shortening items to something like "shopping trip," at which point too much context is lost (what if you have a second shopping trip?).
Likewise, if you want to dump all the todos you can think of for the week and it's 20 or 30 small items, it's not clear that would work well in these layouts.
This is not to malign this system which I think is really cool, but to suggest that it's more useful to see real and more varied content in a system like this to see how it "really looks" rather than exclusively made-to-measure content of 1-6 super-short items per list.
0: https://anjahome.com/summer-bullet-journal-ideas/#What_Is_a_...
https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html
https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html
It is essentially:
- One hidden folder for journal entries
- Each entry is a file of the form YYYY-MM-DD.md
- A bash alias will open today's file (or "yesterday" or "next thursday" or "2 weeks") using the date cli util
- A few vim formatting steps make the already-well-functioning github markdown work very nicely.
However my script only opens up the current date - love your extension to enable opening up other dates - gonna steal that :)
The main thing is that Joplin is still markdown, and I can trivially export if I want to switch to something else.
Some others have said it but the only problem with a lot of these systems is that by their very nature they are a better experience on a desktop than on mobile. Joplin is the only one I've used that even attempts to solve that problem. Even when you have one that works on mobile its a second class experience IMO. I used to try really hard to find a note capture system that I loved that worked in both environments. These days I just use apple notes on mobile and nb on desktop.
[0] https://xwmx.github.io/nb/
So do you store all your files in DropBox and the use Joplin to access them via mobile? I’m intrigued by how the two interact.
I don’t even try to access via mobile. You can but it’s a second class experience. I just use Apple notes and transfer anything I care about over to nb about once a week or so.
You probably can get a mobile thing going w Joplin or obsidian but it would require a little bit of scripting to get nb to pick up any new notes you create as it relies upon .index files at the root of each directory to know it’s contents instead of doing I/O operations. I assume this is for performance reasons.
https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli
`pip install diarycli`
Alternatively there is a shell version if you are averse to python/pip package manager as well:
https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh
I've been using this for years, it doesn't have any fancy features - it only reliably opens up/create today's diary in vim whenever I type `diary` in command line. with some minor utilities.
It is life changing - having `diary` where I can type my thoughts into whenever. I maintain a separate one both for work and life - and both are proving invaluable.
It looks through the folder (i.e. year/month/date.md) and try to find whether today's diary exist. If it does exist it just opens it, otherwise it creates it.
The script actually accept other terminal editors if you edit a single line in the package. I imagine it will be easy to change to use sublime as well.
Works pretty well, except for those times you don't have data.
I don't use any of Obsidian's fancy features, apart from tags and the occasional note link (so that I don't have to copy-paste a reference from another note).
I use the "daily note" feature if I want to jot something down quickly. I then formalise it later and when I'm at my computer, I check in the markdown files into git with a script that modifies the timestamps of the commit(s) to match the last-modified date of the files I'm checking in. This is so that I can know exactly when I wrote down a note, so that I can correlate the commit with other records like my browser history.
After many years I've eventually landed on using [work ticket tracker] for work tracking, Apple Reminders for todo lists which are rarely complex items, and Logseq for journaling. My journal really is just that, I rarely go back to previous entries, but I find it helpful to spend a bit of time each day just noting down what I did and how I felt about it. I sometimes joke that this is my insurance policy in case the Police knock on my door and ask me what I did on the 12th of March this year.
I honestly enjoy it less than some of the more complex plain text systems I’ve used/built in the past but it has the advantage of actually being practical for me.
It’s probably almost a decade since I last used an abbreviation; I consistently found I just didn’t quite like them, and migrated to other ways of doing things. It was digraphs at first, still a Vim feature, and then Compose key sequences, which is where I’ve stayed ever since, preferring them mostly because they work everywhere, not just Vim. Now I type apostrophes, quotation marks, dashes, and other interesting things as I go perfectly casually, and would hate to be without a Compose key. (I’ve typed every non-ASCII character in this comment with my Compose key—just as well I still remembered · even though I practically never use it any more.)
> You can use x and o as well, but × (U+00D7, MULTIPLICATION SIGN) and · (U+00B7, MIDDLE DOT) are more … gourmet.
I’d go more gourmet than that: I use • (U+2022 BULLET) and ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2713 CHECK MARK) for lists. If you really wanted a cross, you could also go with ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2717 BALLOT X). The ordering holds, either way: 0x2022 < 0x2713, though I cringe at unbridled sorting of these lines.
(I do all my own writing in a lightweight markup language I’ve been developing, one property of which is that it leans on CSS Counter Styles for lists for spectacular matching of source and compiled result, so that you can write “(i) ”, “17. ”, “• ”, “‹CHECK MARK› ”, &c. and get matching appearance in the HTML output—or will, when I finally get round to finishing the parser and implementing HTML conversion. I write lists with mingled •, and bullets and it’s great.)
Anyway: back to the abbreviations matter: you could also enter all these characters with digraphs (CTRL-K …) or Compose key sequences (Compose …, but since your keyboard lacks a Compose key you’ll need to map one—I use RAlt on my current laptop because that’s conveniently positioned, but I really wish my spacebar was just split into at least three keys):
• · is digraph .M or ~. and Compose sequence .- or .^ or ^.
• × is digraph *X or /\ and Compose sequence xx
• • is digraph oo and Compose sequence .=
• ‹CHECK MARK› is digraph OK and a popular Compose sequence is @/ (present in kragen’s list, as included out of the box by WinCompose, but not standard on other platforms)
• ‹BALLOT X› is digraph XX and a popular Compose sequence is @X
You can define your own Vim digraphs too (:digraph), and make your own ~/.XCompose to set your own Compose sequences.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GuidoTap...
With the list of Unicode characters supported here:
https://github.com/mvoidex/UnicodeMath/blob/master/table.md
https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html
https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html