pen 0.1.0a0

Simple cli that creates and manages text-based journals

🖋️ Pen - your command line diary

Pen allows you to quickly jot down your thoughts right from the command line. All your journals will be stored as text, which means you can simply put them into cloud storage or on a USB flash drive and access it from anywhere, even without pen itself. It takes a lot of inspiration from jrnl and tries to create a similar interface that is just as easy to use, but Pen is rewritten from the ground up in modern Python, aiming for a more stable and enhanced experience. Currently, Pen is still in an early stage, but some nice additional features are planned. Windows is currently not supported. If you are on Windows (and not using WSL) and want to use Pen, leave an issue on GitHub and ask for support.

Journaling

Writing about your daily routine has been linked to therapeutic health benefits like stress reduction [1] [2]. For years, practitioners have used logs, questionnaires, journals and other writing forms to help people heal from stresses and traumas. It's not necessary to journal every single day, because it should not become a burden. However, when you feel like it would help get things off your mind, when you feel stressed by something or when you just want to go through an experience in your head again before forgetting too many details, writing it down can be a very relieving and helpful experience.

Pen is also great just as a simple note-keeping app. You could for example create a journal called 'code' where you briefly describe the cool new library you learnt about today so you can go back to it later, or to describe how you solved a difficult programming problem.

You can also use Pen to track progress in your work, in the gym or on the race track. Having a place to note your achievements, personal records or how much weight you lost over time is a great motivator, as you can always look back and see how fast you progressed.

Using Pen

To make a new entry, just type:

pen

If you haven't run Pen on this machine before, a short setup dialog will start, asking about your preferences like which editor you want to use. Pen will always try to infer these settings from your environment variables and only ask when necessary. You can always change the way Pen behaves by changing its configuration which is by default located at $HOME/.config/pen. You can also change the config file's location by exporting the PEN_HOME environment variable before running pen. This is especially useful if you want to sync your config using Dropbox, Google Cloud or a different cloud storage service.

(Planned) Features

Implemented features are marked with a ✔. The list is ordered by their planned implementation order, but the order may change.

Feature	?	Note
Fully text based	✔
Uses your OS settings when possible (from environment variables)	✔	$EDITOR, $VISUAL, $LC_TIME and more!
Multiple Journals	✔	One can be set as default
Writing/Deleting/Editing entries	✔
Journals as single file	✔
Plugin System	✔*	(*still being extended) based on pluggy
Extendable Import System	✔	supports imports from jrnl
Filtering by date, tag, starred
Fast Search
Tags
Star entries (favourite)
git sync		Can use cloud to sync (Dropbox, etc.)
Journals as hierarchical directory
Encryption
Custom Prompts
Store in custom file formats	✔ (1)	plugins can extend this! currently implemented: Markdown
Imports from other sources		None planned plugins possible

References

[1]: Smyth, Joshua M. (1999). Written emotional expression: Effect sizes, outcome types, and moderating variables.