Keep Journal with jrnl

Productivity Sauce

Jun 30, 2013 GMT

Dmitri Popov

A journal application can be used for a variety of purposes: from keeping track of things you've accomplished to jotting down notes and ideas. And jrnl can be a perfect tool for the job, if working from the command line is your thing. Installing jrnl from the latest source code is a matter of running three commands (make sure that you have Git installed on your system before you proceed):

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

Run then the jrnl command, and you'll be prompted to create a new journal and encrypt it. Using jrnl is equally easy. For example, to view the five most recent journal entries, run the jrnl -n 5 command. Want to see all entries from last year till June this year? Use the jrnl -from "last year" -to june command. jrnl also supports tags, and you can turn any word into a tag by prepending the @ sign to it:

jrnl Fixed upload issue in @Pygmyfoto

You can then display all journal entries containing a specific tag with the jrnl @tag command (e.g., jrnl @Pygmyfoto). The application can also handle smart timestamps like yesterday, last friday, at 5pm, 7 may, etc.

jnrl allows you to export data, and the application has two commands for that. The jrnl --json command exports the journal data in the JSON format (useful for use with other applications), while the jrnl --markdown command outputs the data in the human-readable format with Markdown markup.

« previous post next post »