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Jrnl – A simple command line journal application

161 pointsby kul_almost 11 years ago

25 comments

akerl_almost 11 years ago
&quot;military-grade AES encryption&quot;<p>Can we please, as an industry, agree to stop using bogus terminology like this?<p>&quot;Even the NSA won&#x27;t be able to read your dirty secrets&quot;<p>And can we stop using ~&quot;Our encryption beats the NSA&quot; as a selling point, given that:<p>1. It doesn&#x27;t take into consideration the various side-channel attacks the NSA would actually use<p>2. It&#x27;s unlikely to be true even discounting side-channel attacks<p>3. It&#x27;s a scare tactic at best, akin selling boats that are rated &quot;kraken-proof&quot;.
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Monkeygetalmost 11 years ago
I keep a coding journal of all those unsettled questions and thoughts that pop in my mind. The questions I ask myself, the things I could improve,... It turns out to be highly valuable in my projects and I recommend anyone to try it.<p>I started a comment but it became gargantuan so I turned it into a blog post : <a href="http://tburette.github.io/blog/2014/06/25/the-power-of-keeping-a-coding-journal/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tburette.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;25&#x2F;the-power-of-keepi...</a>
chrisfarmsalmost 11 years ago
If you are relying on that encryption, just remember to clear your bash history :)
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padraigkalmost 11 years ago
Nice util. Just a suggestion for the encryption: You should consider using a password-based key derivation function (PBKDF) rather than just hashing the key once with SHA256. This could help deter brute-force attacks particularly if the chosen hashing function is computationally intensive; e.g. scrypt
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yoanizeralmost 11 years ago
I&#x27;ve been using vim and text files. If you want to create a journal entry for today: $ vim $(date +%a_%d_%m_%Y.txt) type your text and you are set.<p>If you want to search&#x2F;sort&#x2F;filter, etc your journal files, Unix has already all the tools you want. (grep, find, less, cat, sed, etc).<p>Don&#x27;t sweat the small stuff.
arh68almost 11 years ago
I almost really like this tool. It&#x27;s close to being seamless and Unixy, offering a pretty small command-line-option-language that expresses a bunch of journal-related commands. I like that idea, a lot. But the recipes dive right into piping text through wc and grep, so I wonder: what exactly does this offer over some bash functions and raw textfiles? I&#x27;ve already got cat, grep, find, tail, xargs et al.<p>More nitpicking: the * escaping bothers me. That&#x27;s a core feature, using the * to mark things, but you have to avoid letting bash expand it. Are there any better characters? Does &#x27;single quoting&#x27; help anything?<p>The fuzzy date parsing looks great. (: I also think the no-dash (new entry) vs dash (filters..) vs double-dash (action) convention is fairly neat as far as calling conventions go. Tagging things with @ seems like a useful convention, too, even if I end up using notepad.
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nodivbyzeroalmost 11 years ago
Emacs Org mode is way to go!!! <a href="http://orgmode.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;orgmode.org&#x2F;</a>
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tylerneylonalmost 11 years ago
I&#x27;m a big fan of self-analytics. I also like small-but-useful command-line tools of this nature. This is pleasantly documented and purpose-driven.<p>If you&#x27;re looking for something more focused on short daily summaries of what you&#x27;ve done, I wrote a similar tool called wj:<p><a href="http://tylerneylon.com/a/wj/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tylerneylon.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;wj&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s more about organization and presentation than privacy. For example, it can generate a tex file that converts your entries into a nicely formatted pdf file.<p>I also like the automated self-analytics Stephen Wolfram uses:<p><a href="http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.stephenwolfram.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;03&#x2F;the-personal-analytic...</a>
zrailalmost 11 years ago
I&#x27;ve been tracking various git actions (commits and branch creates and checkouts) in a file via git hooks for the past year or so and it&#x27;s been super valuable to go back and look at, especially to remind myself what I was doing yesterday for standup meetings.<p>This is far and away a better solution, since I can have `jrnl` auto-tag those things and filter them in&#x2F;out when I want to look at regular journal entries.
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danneualmost 11 years ago
Consistently journaling has been my most valuable habit over the past 5 years.<p>It&#x27;s the only way to relive thoughts I&#x27;ll never have again because I become jaded. It&#x27;s also a great way to grasp just how much of everything I forget. I wonder if I&#x27;d even have any personal stories to tell from the time I studied in Prague if I hadn&#x27;t written so much of it down while enamored by it all.
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desipenguinalmost 11 years ago
I use vimwiki diary mode, and a cronjob that pops up a vim window (with pre-populated timestamp) every 30 minutes. Been doing that for over 18 months now.<p>Original article where I got this idea : <a href="http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2012/11/23/vimwiki/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stochasticgeometry.ie&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;vimwiki&#x2F;</a>
dufferzafaralmost 11 years ago
Looks great! though I&#x27;d have loved it even more if there were binaries available. I just like having all my favorite applications in one portable folder. I&#x27;m guessing using something like py2exe to create one won&#x27;t be hard.<p>Also, what are the chances that the jrnl[encrypted] package will work on Windows? (without using Cygwin?)
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bshimminalmost 11 years ago
This looks pretty neat.<p>Just a small thing - the little terminal goes a bit crazy if you click the carousel arrows forward a few times.
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pqsalmost 11 years ago
This sounds great. I use Day One for my personal diary and org-mode for work stuff. This setup was quite good but now it is much better because, if it works as promised, Jrnl will allow me to add personal entries in Day One from the linux computer I use at work. Thanks! :-)
gemlogalmost 11 years ago
I just tested this with zimwiki, works perfectly, as it&#x27;s all plain text files. <a href="http://zim-wiki.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zim-wiki.org&#x2F;</a> I didn&#x27;t try it with encryption as zim wouldn&#x27;t understand it.
christiangencoalmost 11 years ago
Very cool! I built a command line tool to solve a similar problem a few years ago: <a href="https://github.com/christiangenco/t_time_tracker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;christiangenco&#x2F;t_time_tracker</a>
ripteralmost 11 years ago
I&#x27;ve been using <a href="http://www.geeknote.me/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geeknote.me&#x2F;</a> for a while now. Jrnl looks interesting, I&#x27;ll have to try it out and see how it compares.
schnevetsalmost 11 years ago
Fantastic! I made a quick and dirty BASH solution two years ago and I&#x27;ve been meaning to rewrite it in python ever since. It&#x27;s uncanny how similar this design is to what I was planning, though.
listicalmost 11 years ago
This tool writes journal entries to a local file and you have to read them back via this tool, am I right?<p>Can it play with an external service, e.g. can my journal be public via Tumblr or some static site generator?
thegeomasteralmost 11 years ago
Oooh, great! Just something I needed! Kudos for the author.
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LVBalmost 11 years ago
Minor comment on the otherwise nice site: repeatedly clicking the right arrow on the side of the demo console causes it to get confused.
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IanCalalmost 11 years ago
Awesome. Small, simple, text-file based.
donniezazenalmost 11 years ago
What do you guys think about org-mode once you get over the initial learning curve?
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bybjornalmost 11 years ago
How does the use of encryption affect&#x2F;play with DayOne?
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chidalmost 11 years ago
How well does this deal with conflicts with DayOne?
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