org-journal.el

Adapted from http://www.emacswiki.org/PersonalDiary

Functions to maintain a simple personal diary / journal in Emacs. Feel free to use, modify and improve the code! — mtvoid, bastibe

This file is also available from marmalade under the name org-journal. After installing, add the line (require 'org-journal) to your .emacs or init.el to activate it. You also need to specify the directory where your journal files will be saved. You can do this by setting the variable org-journal-dir (remember to add a trailing slash). org-journal-dir is also a customizable variable. The default value for org-journal-dir is ~/Documents/journal/.

Inside the journal directory, a separate file is created for each day with a journal entry, with a file name in the format YYYYMMDD. Each journal entry is an org-mode file that begins with the date on the top, followed by a heading with the time. Any subsequent entries on the same day are written as additional headings in the same file, with their own time. You can customize the date and time formats (or remove them entirely). To start writing a journal entry, press C-c j.

You can browse through existing journal entries on disk via the calendar. All dates for which an entry is present are highlighted. Pressing j will open it up for viewing. Pressing [ or ] will select the date with the previous or next journal entry, respectively. Pressing i j will create a new entry for the chosen date.

Quick summary: To create a new journal entry: C-c j

In calendar view:

• j to view an entry
• i j to add a new entry
• [ to go to previous entry
• ] to go to next entry

When viewing a journal entry:

• C-c f to view next entry
• C-c b to view previous entry

A typical journal entry for a day would look like this:

(it will actually look a lot nicer, depending on your org-mode settings)

* Tuesday, 06/04/13
** 10:28 Company meeting
Endless discussions about projects. Not much progress

** 11:33 Work on org-journal
For the longest time, I wanted to have a cool diary app on my
computer. However, I simply lacked the right tool for that job. After
many hours of searching, I finally found PersonalDiary on EmacsWiki.
PersonalDiary is a very simple diary system based on the emacs
calendar. It works pretty well, but I don't really like that it only
uses unstructured text.

Thus, I spent the last two hours with making that diary use org-mode
and represent every entry as an org-mode headline. Very cool!

** 15:33 Work on org-journal
Now my journal automatically creates the right headlines (adds the
current time stamp if on the current day, does not add a time stamp
for any other day). Additionally, it automatically collapses the
headlines in the org-file to the right level (shows everything if in
view mode, shows only headlines in new-entry-mode). Emacs and elisp
are really cool!

** 16:40 Work on org-journal
I uploaded my journal mode to marmalade and Github! Awesome!