Daily journal text files in an Emacs project
Can you tell today is a holiday? I sat with the laptop to make today's to-do list and then...
Started reading (again) Derek Sivers's epic blog post from 2019 about keeping a daily diary in plaintext files. I'd never looked much at the comments before. He answers questions in there. Three things:
He uses a rudimentary form of backlinks where he references his "thoughts on" journal pages (what I call "topic journals") from inside his daily journal entries.
Yes, if in my daily diary I start writing about a subject I have a journal on, or should, I'll copy it over there and elaborate in that journal. (Then in my daily diary usually say "go see ThoughtsOn/NewZealand.txt for today")
He emails journal entries to himself when he's not at his computer:
I use the email app on my phone if I'm away from the computer. I email myself then add it to my diary/journal later. — Derek
No syncing to his phone:
I just use rsync (the built-in unix command) to backup to my different servers I've set up around the world. So yeah, home grown. But the biggest thing is I don't try to sync between devices. I only use my phone for talk/text/maps. I do all my writing and important stuff on one unix computer.
I like those ideas. Not sure I'll use all of them, but they don't depend on any apps or subscriptions (unless you count email hosting). Not worrying about syncing and perpetually adopting a "one-way" phone -> computer mindset would keep me out of a lot of trouble.
For years I've had a 750 words folder in Dropbox, named after, but not connected to, the 750 words journal website. I used to keep one-file-per-day journal entries in there until I started using Day One, org-journal, Field Notes notebooks, OBTF (One Big Text File in Markdown and org), Journelly, Drafts, etc. Until today, I'd never added that folder as a project in Doom Emacs. After an initial hiccup where I tried adding it as a project and it said "Directory ~/Dropbox/750 words is not a project", which I may or may not have solved by adding a .projectile file to that folder, I can search that project with SPC s p and get instant results listed for each day there's a match.
I really need to turn all these yyyy-mm-dd Daily Notes entries in Drafts into their own individual files. Not today, though!