Tips and Tricks

This page contains tips and tricks for using jrnl, often in conjunction with other tools, including external editors.

Co-occurrence of tags

If I want to find out how often I mentioned my flatmates Alberto and Melo in the same entry, I run

jrnl @alberto --tags | grep @melo

And will get something like @melo: 9, meaning there are 9 entries where both @alberto and @melo are tagged. How does this work? First, jrnl @alberto will filter the journal to only entries containing the tag @alberto, and then the --tags option will print out how often each tag occurred in this filtered journal. Finally, we pipe this to grep which will only display the line containing @melo.

Combining filters

You can do things like

jrnl @fixed -starred -n 10 -to "jan 2013" --short

To get a short summary of the 10 most recent, favourite entries before January 1, 2013 that are tagged with @fixed.

Statistics

How much did I write last year?

jrnl -from "jan 1 2013" -to "dec 31 2013" | wc -w

Will give you the number of words you wrote in 2013. How long is my average entry?

expr $(jrnl --export text | wc -w) / $(jrnl --short | wc -l)

This will first get the total number of words in the journal and divide it by the number of entries (this works because jrnl --short will print exactly one line per entry).

Importing older files

If you want to import a file as an entry to jrnl, you can just do jrnl < entry.ext. But what if you want the modification date of the file to be the date of the entry in jrnl? Try this

echo `stat -f %Sm -t '%d %b %Y at %H:%M: ' entry.txt` `cat entry.txt` | jrnl

The first part will format the modification date of entry.txt, and then combine it with the contents of the file before piping it to jrnl. If you do that often, consider creating a function in your .bashrc or .bash_profile

jrnlimport () {
  echo `stat -f %Sm -t '%d %b %Y at %H:%M: ' $1` `cat $1` | jrnl
}

Using Templates

Templates are text files that are used for creating structured journals. There are three ways you can use templates:

1. Use the --template command line argument and the default $XDG_DATA_HOME/jrnl/templates directory

$XDG_DATA_HOME/jrnl/templates is created by default to store your templates! Create a template (like default.md) in this directory and pass --template FILE_IN_DIR.

jrnl --template default.md

2. Use the --template command line argument with a local / absolute path

You can create a template file with any text. Here is an example:

# /tmp/template.txt
My Personal Journal
Title:

Body:

Then, pass the absolute or relative path to the template file as an argument, and your external editor will open and have your template pre-populated.

jrnl --template /tmp/template.md

3. Set a default template file in jrnl.yaml

If you want a template by default, change the value of template in the config file from false to the template file's path, wrapped in double quotes:

...
template: "/path/to/template.txt"
...

jrnl -n 1

Prompts on shell reload

If you'd like to be prompted each time you refresh your shell, you can include this in your .bash_profile:

function log_question()
{
   echo $1
   read
   jrnl today: ${1}. $REPLY
}
log_question 'What did I achieve today?'
log_question 'What did I make progress with?'

Whenever your shell is reloaded, you will be prompted to answer each of the questions in the example above. Each answer will be logged as a separate journal entry at the default_hour and default_minute listed in your jrnl.yaml config file.

Display random entry

You can use this to select one title at random and then display the whole entry. The invocation of cut needs to match the format of the timestamp. For timestamps that have a space between data and time components, select fields 1 and 2 as shown. For timestamps that have no whitespace, select only field 1.

jrnl -on "$(jrnl --short | shuf -n 1 | cut -d' ' -f1,2)"

Launch a terminal for rapid logging

You can use this to launch a terminal that is the jrnl stdin prompt so you can start typing away immediately.

jrnl --config-override editor ""

Bind this to a keyboard shortcut.

Map Super+Alt+J to launch the terminal with jrnl prompt

• xbindkeys In your .xbindkeysrc

Mod4+Mod1+j
 alacritty -t floating-jrnl -e jrnl --config-override editor "",

• I3 WM Launch a floating terminal with the jrnl prompt

bindsym Mod4+Mod1+j exec --no-startup-id alacritty -t floating-jrnl -e jrnl --config-override editor ""
for_window[title="floating *"] floating enable

Visualize Formatted Markdown in the CLI

Out of the box, jrnl can output journal entries in Markdown. To visualize it, you can pipe to mdless, which is a less-like tool that allows you to visualize your Markdown text with formatting and syntax highlighting from the CLI. You can use this in any shell that supports piping.

The simplest way to visualize your Markdown output with mdless is as follows:

jrnl --export md | mdless

This will render your Markdown output in the whole screen.

Fortunately, mdless has an option that allows you to adjust the screen width by using the -w option as follows:

jrnl --export md | mdless -w 70

If you want Markdown to be your default display format, you can define this in your config file as follows:

display_format: md
# or
display_format: markdown

For more information on how jrnl outputs your entries in Markdown, please visit the Formats section.

Jump to end of buffer (with vi)

To cause vi to jump to the end of the last line of the entry you edit, in your config file set:

editor: vi + -c "call cursor('.',strwidth(getline('.')))"