Advanced Usage

Configuration File

jrnl has a wide variety of options that can be customized through the config file, including templates, formats, multiple journals, and more. See the configuration file reference for details or read on for some common use cases.

Multiple journal files

You can configure jrnlto use with multiple journals (eg. private and work) by defining more journals in your config file, for example:

journals:
  default: ~/journal.txt
  work: ~/work.txt

The default journal gets created the first time you start jrnl Now you can access the work journal by using jrnl work instead of jrnl, eg.

jrnl work at 10am: Meeting with @Steve
jrnl work -n 3

will both use ~/work.txt, while jrnl -n 3 will display the last three entries from ~/journal.txt (and so does jrnl default -n 3).

You can also override the default options for each individual journal. If your jrnl.yaml looks like this:

encrypt: false
journals:
  default: ~/journal.txt
  work:
    journal: ~/work.txt
    encrypt: true
  food: ~/my_recipes.txt

Your default and your food journals won't be encrypted, however your work journal will!

You can override all options that are present at the top level of jrnl.yaml, just make sure that at the very least you specify a journal: ... key that points to the journal file of that journal.

Consider the following example configuration

editor: vi -c startinsert 
journals: 
  default: ~/journal.txt 
  work: 
    journal: ~/work.txt 
    encrypt: true 
    display_format: json 
    editor: code -rw 
  food:
    display_format: markdown 
    journal: ~/recipes.txt 

The work journal is encrypted, prints to json by default, and is edited using an existing window of VSCode. Similarly, the food journal prints to markdown by default, but uses all the other defaults.

Modifying Configurations from the Command line

You can override a configuration field for the current instance of jrnl using --config-override CONFIG_KEY CONFIG_VALUE where CONFIG_KEY is a valid configuration field, specified in dot notation and CONFIG_VALUE is the (valid) desired override value. The dot notation can be used to change config keys within other keys, such as colors.title for the title key within the colors key.

You can specify multiple overrides as multiple calls to --config-override.

Examples:

# Create an entry using the `stdin` prompt, for rapid logging
jrnl --config-override editor ""

# Populate a project's log
jrnl --config-override journals.todo "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/todo.txt" todo find my towel 

# Pass multiple overrides 
jrnl --config-override display_format fancy --config-override linewrap 20 \
--config-override colors.title green

Using an alternate config

You can specify an alternate configuration file for the current instance of jrnl using --config-file CONFIG_FILE_PATH where CONFIG_FILE_PATH is a path to an alternate jrnl configuration file.

Examples:

# Use personalised configuration file for personal journal entries
jrnl --config-file ~/foo/jrnl/personal-config.yaml

# Use alternate configuration file for work-related entries
jrnl --config-file ~/foo/jrnl/work-config.yaml

# Use default configuration file (created on first run)
jrnl