private journaling tool?

Posted on by Luis Villa

Is there any decent local desktop journaling tool available for linux? I want to be able to, with a very minimal number of clicks, say ‘I just had this thought’, write it down, tag it, and easily find it later (say, at the end of a summer employment gig) so that I can review, edit, and perhaps turn it into something more concrete. (Idea being that I’ll journal my summer job both for personal growth and to help deliver useful information to the company about the experience after the fact.)

I’d do it in wordpress, but I’d like to ensure that it is private and don’t want to run wp + mysql on my local machine- a bit of overkill for what I really want, I think.

Tomboy plus the Note of the Day plugin (not packaged for Ubuntu?) plus the new tags plugin might do what I want, but I won’t be able to try it out until… well, not clear when, but ‘not now’. And will require playing with source, which I’m not so excited to do right now (though will be more so once I’m done with school.)

I’ll probably go with one of those two solutions (probably tomboy) but if anyone has other suggestions, I’m all ears.

[19 1/2 hours until I am done with my first year of law school. I am soooo psyched. And I actually think that, miraculously, I’m reasonably well prepared for my last exam…]

Published by Luis Villa

26 thoughts on “private journaling tool?”

  2. I booted a Live CD of Feisty recently and noticed Tomboy on there. It looked interesting, but it’s a Mono app and I’m not sure if I want to risk any kind of dependence on it. (Not saying Mono = Bad, just that I have some fear, uncertainty, and doubt about it based on it’s reliance on MS technology.)

  3. Scott: Should have been clear; Tomboy has been packaged for Ubuntu for ages (and I probably have 200+ notes in it), just that the Note Of The Day plugin is not packaged, as far as I can tell.

    Richard: I’ll take a look at zim- thanks for the pointer. I seem to recall there was some reason I have looked at it and not used it in the past, but I’ll take a look at the latest and greatest.

  4. Thanks for mentioning Zim, Richard — the site is down at the moment but it sounds interesting, and gives me some ideas for a notes program as I move away from Windows. One discussion of Zim pointed at TiddlyWiki which looks promising also — I could use it on Windows at work and GNU/Linux at home, and keep things in sync with SVN.

  5. Try Mallum’s didiwiki. I should update my zeroconf patch, so it shows up in Ephy’s local websites category.

  7. Greg: Ah… still on edgy here (not upgrading in the middle of the school year. Maybe in… 18 hours or so! woot!) (Though realistically I’ll probably skip feisty and go directly to F7, given, you know, who is paying the bills and all that ;)

    I was also pointed (via email) at Notetak– looks very interesting; love the modeless/windowless aspect.

  8. As Gregory says, NotD is included in Feisty. If you want tagging, and you don’t want to build a source release, you’ll probably have to wait until people start packaging 0.7.x releases for Gutsy Gibbon. But since all NotD notes start with “Today:”, it’s pretty easy to search for them even without tagging. :-)

    I’m biased, but I really think Tomboy is perfect for the type of thing you’re talking about. If you have any issues, or if you decide to go with another app, we’d really like to hear your feedback on tomboy-list or in bugzilla. Thanks!

  9. But since all NotD notes start with “Today:”, it’s pretty easy to search for them even without tagging. :-)
    I want to be able to discriminate more finely than that; for example, I’d like to be able to tell RH at the end of the summer ‘here were my thoughts about your HR department’, so I want an HR tag. (Not surprisingly all my journal-like notes so far are about HR :) Ditto for ‘boss’ for personal relationships with the boss, etc.
    I’m biased, but I really think Tomboy is perfect for the type of thing you’re talking about.
    Tomboy is pretty nearly exactly what I want, especially given the tagging and dates plugins. The one thing that bothers me about Tomboy is that the ‘one window per post’ thing has not scaled for me; Notetak looks much nicer in that respect. Perhaps Tomboy could implement a Notetak-like mode, viewing the same content? Just thinking out loud; haven’t even run Notetak yet :)

  10. I want to be able to discriminate more finely than that; for example, I’d like to be able to tell RH at the end of the summer ‘here were my thoughts about your HR department’, so I want an HR tag.
    There’s a patch(see bug #395893) for a “note report generator” plugin that would help you generate that sort of output. Chances are pretty good that this will be available soonish, since Boyd and I are both interested in using it.

    The one thing that bothers me about Tomboy is that the ‘one window per post’ thing has not scaled for me
    Interestingly, right now somebody is working on a port to Maemo. I don’t want to call him out until he’s ready to announce it, but his port uses a single “window” to fit in with the rest of Maemo. Maybe this will also become a Tomboy option in the future.

    Of course, this is all future stuff, and you need to take notes now. Just wanted to let you know that we hear you loud and clear. :-)

  12. The beauty of doing this while working for a tech company instead of while in law school is that I probably have a little more leeway to run HEAD. :) I might take advantage of that after I do the distro upgrade (whatever it ends up being.) (That would be particularly true if the maemo port author has any suggestions for syncing :)

  13. Well, sync is on our roadmap for 0.8.0. Right now we’re trying to see if we should require Conduit for sync, since they just made a release that features Tomboy synchronization. I have no idea if there’s a Maemo port of Conduit, though.

    Of course, if we do our own custom sync implementation, we could probably get it to work on Maemo too.

  15. oh no, what you want is basKet… tat is if you want to run a KDE app that does what you are asking for

    Ed.: suffers from horrible kitchen-sync-itis last time I looked at it- does everything, and hence does nothing well. (Admittedly Tomboy could stand to pick up on basKet’s actual rich text editing, but that is as much gtk/qt’s fault as Tomboy’s.) Incollector looks similar, though I’ll give it a poke.

  16. I know this sounds silly but for the longest time I simply used gedit for jotting down quick notes and ideas. My hard drive on my laptop is littered with folders with notes on varous subjects.

    I am keen on trying TomBoy but hate the Novel/MS relationship. However, I can easily separate in my mind great software from poor business decisions.

    Sean

  20. Text files!

    They are easy to sync and backup. They can be searched and indexed. We have very powerful editors for them.

    For Tags: Just write “tags: notes desktop” as the last line and let the indexer do the rest.

  21. Tiddlywiki.
    Someone mentioned it above, but it needs a comment to itself. A single local html and javascript file, there’s a journal function which tags notes with the date, multiple tags are suported, it’s searchable, portable, plain text…
    And the website of it is itself a Tiddlywiki page!

  22. Red Hat has an internal livejournal / planet setup. You can post internal messages there, or private (for your eyes only) messages.

    Email mizmo to get added when you start.

  23. Ray: ah-ha, that would about do it. :) Still a little nervous about putting stuff on company servers, but it seems like the obvious thing to look at first.

    PingvinRich: re: TiddlyWiki, doesn’t it require you to save the page manually/regularly? That has turned me off it in the past, though maybe it is fixed.

  24. Luis: Tiddlywiki now has an autosave function

    ISTR it saves a new file every time by default, but a small edit means I only have the current html file and the previous one, in case of corruption.

  26. Zim with the trayicon plugin does this elegantly: Right-click and select “Today” and a note labeled with todays date pops up. Perfect for the diary.
    I’ve made a simple script for converting Tomboy notes to Zim notes: http://blafs.com/diverse.html

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