njbrown.com

Journaling with Terminal & text files

Terminal is way better than Apple Notes.

I had a 267-day streak of daily journaling. It ended on March 12, 2023. Why did I stop? Let's read my own words from Mar 12, 2023:

I think this is going to be the last journal entry I do for a while. It’s gotten to be considerably more of a chore than I’d like it to be. I may pick this back up by early May.

Translation: I stopped because there was too much friction. Writing, formatting, and generally working with my journal entries had too many steps. Let's do a side-by-side comparison of Apple Notes vs. Terminal:

Writing

Apple Notes

To write my daily journal entry, I had to:

  1. Open Apple Notes
  2. Navigate to the journalEntries folder
  3. Manually type [YYYY-MM-DD] story as the title
  4. Press enter twice

"That's not that much work!" you say. Yeah, but it probably takes 15 seconds, and I can do it in 2 seconds with Terminal:

Terminal

To write my daily journal entry, I only have to hit this 11-keystroke chord:

  1. <CMD> <SPACE> <t><e><r><m> <ENTER> <e><d><j> <ENTER>

Only takes 2 seconds? Yeah. I'm a fast typer and the chord is burned into my muscle memory. "What does edj do?"[1]

alias edj="cd ~/Documents/journalEntries && vim \"$(date +%Y.%m.%d).txt\""

Make a journalEntries directory within ~/Documents and slap that puppy into your .zshrc and it works. Every time. I know I'm only saving like 13 seconds/day, but I care about those 13 seconds. Plus I feel way cooler when using Terminal.

Formatting

Apple Notes

I love consistency, and keeping a consistent formatting style is extremely difficult. Should I allow myself to use boldface, italics, or underlining? Should I integrate images or emojis into my journal entries? Should I make some text headings and subheadings? I have too many options in Apple Notes. I feel like Calvin's dad in this classic Calvin & Hobbes comic about peanut butter:

Terminal

It is easy to keep a consistent formatting style, because it's all plaintext. No emojis. No images. No headings or subheadings[2]. It's clean and simple.

Backing Up

Apple Notes

Every month, I could either:

  1. Manually copy + paste the contents of every journal entry into a Google Doc or something, then export that whole doc as a PDF.
  2. Use File > Export to PDF for every single journal entry.

This would take me around 5-10 minutes. What about Terminal?

Terminal

Takes 5-10 seconds.

cp ~/Documents/journalEntries/2024.* /Volumes/flashDrive/appropriateFolder

Searching

Apple Notes

You can only search within notes in Apple Notes. So if you want to find something, you have to skim through every note and keep spamming CMD + F.

Terminal

Put into your .zshrc:

search() {
    grep -rni --color=always "$*" ~/Documents/journalEntries \
    | sed "s|$HOME/Documents/journalEntries/||" \
    | less -R
}

Then use search [term] and find stuff almost instantly with the power of grep.

Conclusion

For many reasons, my switch from Apple Notes to Terminal has been a great one. I plan to write a journal entry for every day in 2024, and I'm really excited.

  1. Stands for 'edit daily journal'. ↩︎

  2. You can make headings with # or ---, but that's still plaintext. ↩︎