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There are few things more satisfying than using a well-made tool. ‘jrnl‘ is one of them–a simple, well-made program for taking notes and journal entries, so well-written that it feels like a native Unix utility.

Creating an entry is simple:

$ jrnl This is a journal entry. It will be automatically date-stamped
 [10:18:44] [Journal created at /home/jim/journal.txt]
 [Entry added to default journal
]

It creates a simple text file:

$ cat journal.txt

[10:18:52] 2018-03-09 10:18 This is a journal entry.

It will be automatically date-stamped

If you wanted to create an entry for something in the past or future, it’s simple: (jrnl keeps them sorted by date, too!)

  $ jrnl at April 1, 1918 4:10AM: I was Born
 [10:20:09] [Entry added to default journal]

jrnl doesn’t use a proprietary format,  just a simple text file, so you can edit it and read it with anything.

You’re not limited to raw text, though.  You can export to a variety of formats. Here’s JSON:

$ jrnl --export json                                                                                                                                        [10:54:46] {
 "entries": [
 {
 "title": "I was Born",
 "date": "1918-04-01",
 "time": "04:10",
 "body": "\n",
 "starred": false
 },
 {
 "title": "This is a journal entry.",
 "date": "2018-03-09",
 "time": "10:18",
 "body": "It will be automatically date-stamped\n",
 "starred": false
 }
 ],
 "tags": {}
 }

Installation is easy, if you have Python and PIP installed and configured:

 pip install jrnl