Hey guys, i am planning to begin my Journaling journey starting today. Any recomendations? I have already tried DayOne and Journey Didn’t like them Particularly. DayOne seems uncool and even though they claim, a little unsafe. Plus i once before lost all my journal entries in DayOne bcoz i didn’t save the encryption keys in my GoogleDrive. Journey is Worse (my opinion). They keep on pushing me to buy their paid option which costs 4$ per month. Like WTF. Its just a Journaling app. I am not going to try Penzu because i have heard a lot of bad reviews on how they cheat people and stuff. Finally i landed on DD-DigitalDiary which isn’t open source. Which Sucks. But at least isn’t costing me like 50$ a month or anything. Its mostly free. But i am looking or something better. More specifically OpenSource, Free (or almost free) and idk, modern & sxy Like when will these huge companies understand. Not everything needs to be VC funded. Next i am launching my VC funded Venture backed Fried Eggs company
Was going to say Obsidian, but upon verifying, realized that it’s not actually open source. Interesting.
If you like Obsidian and want open source, check out Logsec.
Whilst not open source, I appreciate that the notes are locally stored in straightforward markdown. I no longer use Obsidian, but I appreciated how there was next to no platform lock-in (the only snag I experienced in moving to a different note taking approach was a couple of plugins that gave additional features. But that’s easy to avoid if portability of data is important)
What are you looking for features? A Simple text editor and saving as markdown is not good enough? Can save it in a cloud host.
I don’t really care a lot about cloud. I like my journal entries to not get read by anyone. No server, nothing. Super secure, open source and free. Maybe if i provide my server URL it can store it over there
Does a simple file not good? Missing the “not read by anyone” So you need a lock/encryption on it?
Plain text is how I have it set up. I have the files named by date in one folder (made effortless with my small script) and a plain text editor on my phone, also pointed to a specific folder. The setup is pretty much ready for Syncthing if I wanted to automate syncing, but I haven’t bothered yet.
You Know, I think you got a point 👍
I used to use RedNotebook[0] wayback when, but have since switched to Emacs and am therefore now an insufferable org-mode/roam user.
Need something primarily in Android. I dont think rednotebook is available in Android
I don’t do journaling full time, but Joplin has been great. FOSS, cross-platform, allows you to pick sync target (if you want any, I use my cloud provider) and on top of it all it supports e2e encryption of your notes.
Nicest thing (personally): allows you to export markdown/html/pdf/etc…
I tried Joplin. I found it … (no offence) but Boring. Like a grey screen. You khow, like maybe it has everything. But mindnummingly dull. Like i am coming from DD-DigitalDiary so maybe its just me. But … like it has animations. But so so (youknow) boring Why cant a Journaling app look cool. Does it have to put me to sleep (Again no offence to anyone who loves Joplin)
Haha no worries, I know what you mean. I love Joplin and personally like the style, but it is bland compared to alot of other apps. Hoping that it will evolve and offer more themes :)
Notesnook.
It’s FOSS, it’s loaded with features, it’s cross-platform, and offers a self-hostable FOSS sync server, too.
What about just a simple paper notebook?
(I’m not trying to be a jerk)
Tried it. Didn’t work. Bcoz we have to write. More work. I want something easy. Like Speech To Text. When a paper notebook comes with Speech to Text i will definately get onboard
Text files used to be a thing.
I’m not one for journalling but I was looking for notes and I didn’t like Logseq since it was to journally for me. https://logseq.com/
Bro, u may like DD-DigitalDiary. It is SocialMedialy. Kind of like BeReal or Instagram 😊
TrilliumNext Notes is a great one.
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I recomend vscodium + github for Linux. Use it Myself But i am looking for Android primarily and not Linux And Pen & Paper. Tried it or 10yrs but i rarely wrote ever. Whenever i sat down to write i got bored and couldnt finish. Maybe its similar to attention disorder or something but writing using pen & paper is hard. Thats why i prefer SpeechToText (for Android) or at least a keyboard (for Linux / PC)
It sounds like you might like Logsec. I use it for general note-keeping, but I think it would work really well as a journal because it defaults to a new time-stamped entry when you open it. These entries are presented chronology like a journal, and you can create links to other pages if you want to dive further into a specific topic.
Also, all entries are saved as standard markdown files, so they would be easy to adapt to another software later if needed. This also makes it really easy to sync data between devices with something like Syncthing.
@Sauron Joplin (mentioned earlier) is fantastic. I use Standard Notes. Big fan.
You know, the more i read the recomendations the more i am starting to like DD-DigitalDiary. There are a lot of issues with it. I am not saying there isnt. But its COOL. And Not Boring. Like Joplin has everything i want but it is super boring. Standard Notes is Not. It is Better. At least i guess similar to DayOne but with the Sync options which is pretty cool. But have you seen the UI/UX designs of DD-DigitalDiary. Like it looks more like Instagram than a normal journaling application. I Wish they make it OpenSource soon though
Standard Notes. You can even self host.
I do pen and paper.
I also write cursive as an obfuscation tactic. Makes it harder for the younger generations to figure out what my thoughts were.
I can only read it from a distance, but being bilingual doesn’t help either
I learned Pitman shorthand. It combined with cursive English makes it so only a few elderly women and I can read my diary.
I have tried all the biggest name tools, but have concluded that analog pen and paper work best
Especially if you care about security much
