Journal

Journal

Ctrl+8. A timeline: time along the top, entries as blocks under it.

The journal records what you did and when — a call, a meeting, a document you worked on, a note to yourself about a conversation. The reference has long since stopped developing its own; this one is kept because a timeline is a genuinely different way to read a month, and nothing else in the application offers one.

Views

Six, from the View tab. Three are the timeline banded differently and three are lists:

By Type	The timeline, its bands one per entry type. The default.
By Contact	The timeline, its bands one per contact.
By Category	The timeline, its bands one per colour category.
Entry List	One row an entry, grouped by what kind of thing it was.
Phone Calls	The calls alone.
Last 7 Days	The same rows, kept to the week just gone.

The timeline's scale is Day, Week or Month, on the same tab; Today, Back and Forward move it.

The five things people look for

Recording something. New Journal Entry. An entry has a subject, a type, a start time and a duration — and the duration is the point: a journal entry is a stretch of time, which is what makes the timeline readable.

Timing a call. Start the entry, leave it open, close it when the call ends. The duration is filled in from the clock.

Reading a month. Switch the scale to Month and band By Contact. What you get is who you spent the month on, which no list of appointments will tell you.

Finding an entry. The search box matches the subject and the notes.

Categories. The same colour categories as everywhere else, and By Category bands the timeline on them.

What it does not do yet

Nothing joins an entry to a contact's record. You can band the timeline by contact, but a contact's own Activities page cannot find their journal entries — which is the one question a journal is kept to answer. It is a known gap, named here rather than left to be discovered.

The reference's own journal watched Office documents and logged them automatically. Nothing here does that, and nothing will: an application that quietly records what you open is not one this is trying to be. Entries are written because you wrote them.

Where things are

• The entry type: chosen on the entry itself. There is no Options page for this module.
• Which store: the PIM store, ~/.local/share/mailbox/pim.db, with calendars, contacts, tasks and notes.