Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Alpha has made similar arguments, and I tend to agree. I’m currently looking at options for brining over nearly 10 years of journal entries into another format and wishing I’d just put it all in Moleskine notebooks the entire time.
For a minimalist all-text* approach, consider jrnl.sh, which lets you journal or log activity from the command line. I’m playing around with it, and it’s great if you already keep track of most of your info in plain text or markdown files (eg, Obsidian, nvUltra, etc.).
- With just a little effort, you can add Markdown image links, with all the usual benefits and drawbacks
It’s not just file formats but also storage media. I’ve got thousands of .JPG, PDF and .txt files, on CD ROMS. In fact one ongoing project is to move them off that media while I still have a computer and drive that can read them, into working storage and thence into AWS glacier Archives complete with instruction on how to handle them after my death.
Think of the historians when archiving old stuff. Please!
I am using Diarium and it works for me.
The developers make useful improvements periodically and I find it easy to use.
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Stephen, journals and diaries are essentially used interchangeably in the US. To further elaborate, kids keeps diaries and adults keep journals. I am more comfortable with the word “diary” myself- just a habit. Journal is slightly more formal (I’m not, LOL!!). It is used far more often than it use to be.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain “markdown” to me. I have looked it up a number of times but I sense I’m missing a bit. It seems to me to be a language used on the Web which has the formalities assigned to text which are “marked down”. In other words, nothing fancy like uncommon fonts etc. so that the text is “cleaner” and, ergo, easier to decipher.
Markdown is a lightweight way to format text, without using anything but plain text.
There are a couple ideas behind it. One is that it’s fast and easy, and pretty intuitive even if you don’t know you’re looking at Markdown. It’s universal — you can use it whatever the actual formatting options are in the app or service you’re using, or even where there is no formatting possible (eg, Messages).
It can be converted into HTML, rich text or other formats. It’s “future-proof” — it doesn’t lock you in to any one app or format (.docx, .odd etc.).
A variety of apps also interpret it, by making emphasis bold or italic, making headings bigger, and so on — so you can have the best of both worlds: all the benefits of plain text, much of the styling or traditional formatting.
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Thanks for your terrific explanation! It has been in the back of mind for a while.
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I love Markdown. It lets me think about what I’m writing, not how to format it. And when I need to make it pretty I can use Marked or a similar app to get as fancy as I want.
It’s possible to do almost everything people do with text using just markdown, thanks to some smart and creative developers out there. I use it (or offshoots like Multimarkdown and mermaid.js) for:
- notes
- reports / documents
- journals and logs
- tasks
- calendar items (sort of)
- presentations / slide decks
- flowcharts and other simple diagrams
- simple tables
The biggest gap so far (in my world, which is nearly all text and numbers — no audio, video and few images) is spreadsheets with formulas and calculations.
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I used MacJournal for about ten years until I discovered Evernote which allowed entries from IOS as well. That served for another ten years until Evernote started to disintegrate. Now I’m back on MacJournal with the data file on iCloud and it’s working fine for basic journaling. I miss the option for making entries from my phone but it’s less terrible to transfer entries from the Notes app into MacJournal than dealing with what Evernote has become.
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I have a subscription to the bundle SetApp for $10/mo (terrific bargain). One of the apps I downloaded today is NotePlan which apparently uses Markdown. I just double-checked. It (still) looks quite attractive. I’m a sucker for an attractive UI.
Are you familiar with them?
But I imagine that a simple format would be conducive to what you are writing instead of fiddling with the format, unless you are quite familiar with the app.
I had AppleWorks and ClarisWorks before it down really well. LOL!!
I just bought a new MacBook Air. I have been using iPads, iPhones, Ipods for quite some time. I love them but I am reacquainting myself with working, writing, playing on a computer. I initially learned on a Mac so I have fallen behind but that’s ok. Much of it is coming back. I believe most learning is like that. (Especially writing I find is far easier on a computer and I cannot type).
Now I’ll understand when David and Steve are going on about markdown!
How much of the web would you estimate is done in markdown? I use to have a very basic knowledge of html. Markdown sounds like it pretty awesome.
Sort of reminds me of why I encourage people to buy Apple devices. Why work harder when you can work smarter, have fun and avoid aggravation!
NotePlan is a great app — and, to avoid completely hijacking the thread, is great for journaling as well as other notes. It absolutely uses markdown and is adding support for various features all the time. It’s great for notes as well as for tasks and even time-blocking (or hyper scheduling as MacSparky calls it). It has a great iOS app as well.
Along with Drafts it has some of the more beautiful and flexible rendering of markdown as formatted text that I’ve seen. It also (unlike Drafts but like Obsidian, The Archive, nvUltra and others) stores notes (and tasks, etc.) in plain text files that you can open in any text editor; literally the only drawback I’ve run into for me is that the folder is buried deep in iCloud Drive — a more or less necessary side effect of how it syncs between iOS and/or multiple Macs. (You can use Dropbox and a folder anywhere, but the sync isn’t as good.)
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That is exactly what I was using it for: journaling!
Hi Stephen, curious why you don’t just journal in DEVONthink?
Ah, I’ve been asked that before on DEVONthink forum and it’s a perfectly fair question, of course. In brief, it’s because I’ve developed a system that works really well for my style of journalling.
I find—especially now that I’ve given up using sync in Day One—that the Day One format for journalling is quite convenient. For example, it’s useful to have the timeline displayed beside the entries and I also like auto addition of the location (which I suspect DEVONthink could do as well, in fairness), weather (which DEVONthink would not easily do, I think) and time of the entry (i.e., updated to the time of the last entry of the day).
In general terms, my Day One to DEVONthink workflow is now so seamless that, for me, it works really well and just suits my style of journalling. I add to each Day One entry during the course of the day, create links to other entries in Day One as appropriate and use hashtags for some entries (like #significant, #holiday, etc.). When entries are imported into Day One I update the links to work in DEVONthink (using an AppleScript script) and hashtags are converted into YAML front matter (also using AppleScript). I also add photos in DEVONthink quite frequently—which I avoided doing in Day One for fear of bogging down the app.
For what it’s worth I have also developed an AppleScript script which reproduces the form of the imported Day One header and prompts for location and weather (adding the time automatically) so that if I do eventually abandon Day One (or Day One abandons me!) I shall be able to reproduce in DEVONthink entries in the format of the 19,000 entries I have already imported into DEVONthink from Day One.
Sorry for the lengthy response.
Stephen
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