I've been going on and off with journaling and this time I want to go all in with it.
I was wondering about what tools are you using, and what is your flow?
Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
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Re: Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
#2I use vim for the spell checking and just keep it offline most of the time. It's more for me than anyone else when I want to respond to others about a particular topic.
Re: Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
#3i use obsidian with the daily notes plugin and write stream of consciousness for about 15 minutes. sometimes i type, other times i use a dictation app.
lately i have been taking my daily notes and running them through a local LLM. i prompt it to “think like a therapist” and ask me follow up questions. this can dig up some interesting insights from time to time.
Re: Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
#4DayOne is good :)
Re: Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
#5I write whatever in my big Org file. The key is to write something different every day. Having a routine topic becomes boring, and, well, routine. So in my big Org file there is everything worth referencing again, and in the morning I’ll take a wide overview of it, coming back to a few particular items like long-term goals or how the year has been, and that’s the starting point for the thoughts that I then jot down.
Staring at a blank file every morning isn’t interesting to me, but adding a little chunk of thought casually to my second brain is rewarding in itself.
I’m an Org Mode evangelist. I didn’t get it at first but now I don’t think I could get rid of it. I’ll probably be editing this file until my final days!
Re: Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
#6I use vim. Very little flow. My personal journal is a single latex document, I write about 25k words per year in it. I have a macro that inserts the date and time and I write my entry after that. At the end of the year, I spend a few hours re-reading and reflecting. I'll probably convert it to markdown soon.
At work, I keep a markdown file open. I take notes from meetings, quick entries to describe what I'm working on a few times a day. It's a single file that goes back to my hire date with current employer. Super useful.
I store both in private git repo's along with shell scripts and config files.
Re: Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
#7Plain text files with gedit organized by month, e.g., journals/2025/10.txt
Re: Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
#8I wrote my own app (Minders) and use it to write long and short entries here and there. I made the UI look like Twitter (replies, likes, hashtags, media, link previews), so I kind of use it as a dumping ground for bookmarks and images too. It's chronological and filterable, so it's easy to find stuff later.
I was never into the journaling where you're prompted with a question or try to investigate your feelings and state of mind, so it works for me. Sometimes I'll dump what I'm thinking of my life and how my day went and sometimes I'll just post a random link I thought was really interesting.
Re: Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
#9I use Obsidian with a "daily-planning" template that has a bunch of typical journaling prompts. I customize it over time, adding new ideas and removing boring bits.
Current sections are: - Things to remember - List of 10 important quotes/mantras - What's on my mind - How am I feeling productivity/mood wise today - What do I most want to accomplish? - What would make today horrible? - Gratitude - Something Mundane, something that happened by chance, something I made happen
Re: Ask HN: How Do You Journal?
#10Single .txt file in Notepad++