Joplin-jrnl

Posted on 2021-06-30 in misc • 1 min read

One of the things I am constantly trying to do better is note taking. I do generally prefer to take notes on paper, but I like the accessiblity of things being digital. I'm also a huge nerd, so end up trying to make digital work. I have tried various things over the years, and typically come back to joplin

I read this post regarding "incremental notetaking" and thought "hey! that's kind of what I want to do!". Over the years I have toyed with jrnl. I really liked its minimal approach and fully CLI. The only thing is that I would rather have my journal entries side-by-side with my notes that I take in Joplin. So what can I do? Build a tool, apparently.

Approach

I want to have a tool that writes things in joplin, but behaves basically the same way as jrnl.

So I am writing joplin-jrnl (jj) to fill this niche. The idea of the general workflow would be to create a note with jj as soon as it hits me. Then when expanding more details, create additional notes in Joplin that are linked with the internal ID of the other notes. This will create a nice linked memory to show the intial thoughts that sparked something, and then the details as it unfolds.

It is pretty rough right now, but it does append to notes, and we'll see how that pans out in the long term.