What do you use to journal with?

Father_Redbeard
2023-06-25T18:17:56Z

The recent PKM thread had me thinking about what folks are using as journaling app/portal. I do use Obsidian for my second brain right now and genuinely love it. But I find the mobile app on Android to be a bit clunky, if I'm honest. Seems slow to open even with very few plugins. For jounaling I've used DayOne for years. I started back when it was iOS/MacOS only, but then switched phone to Android and haven't been back. But now they have an app and web app for that. What I don't like is the somewhat goofy format it saves in and it's on their servers. They used to allow you to at least leverage your own Dropbox, but no longer.

For the past several months I've tried several FOSS options. Main criteria is that I could host it myself, supports offline entries stored in an open file format (preferably MarkDown), and had either multi platform app or a decent web app. That lead me to try these:

Memos
Pros:

Great persistent web app

Slick UI that is light and snappy

markdown support
Cons:

Stuffs the .md inside a database file so can be a bit cumbersome to export data

No offline support. There is a 3rd party app that hopes to implement it

Flatnotes
Pros:

Incredibly simple

Another easily deployed app

Flat Markdown files
Cons:

Web app on mobile is almost unusable as in it doesn't scale well to smaller screens

Very early development, but very likely to stay as minimalistic as it is now.

No offline and very unlikely to ever have it

Joplin
Pros:

Multi platform apps that perform well

End-to-end encryption supported

Could replace both DayOne and my To-do solution (Google Keep)

Offline support
Cons:

More database stuff instead of flat markdown files

One solution I've been testing lately is using IAWriter to write to a 'Journal' folder within my Obsidian vault on Google drive Obsidian Vault > Journal > 2023.... for example. This works surprisingly well. Of course IAWriter is a bit spendy at $29 for Android and then more $ for other platforms as they're sold separately.

So I'm curious what other people are using for just simple daily journaling, random thoughts, etc. If there's an approach I've missed I'd love to hear it. Joplin is so dang close but not having the structure of plaintext files is a no go for me as I don't want to be trapped by any one product should something happen to the development down the road. Doesn't have to be free, but I want control of the entries either on my own server or cloud storage.

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