Journal Types

jrnl can store your journal in a few different ways:

  • a single text file (encrypted or otherwise)
  • a folder structure organized by date containing unencrypted text files
  • the DayOne Classic format

There is no need to specify what type of journal you'd like to use. Instead, jrnl will automatically detect the journal type based on whether you're referencing a file or a folder in your config file, and if it's a folder, whether or not DayOne Classic content exists in it.

Single File

The single file format is the most flexible, as it can be encrypted. To use it, enter any path that is a file or does not already exist. You can use any extension. jrnl will automatically create the file when you save your first entry.

Folder

The folder journal format organizes your entries into subfolders for the year and month and .txt files for each day. If there are multiple entries in a day, they all appear in the same .txt file.

The directory tree structure is in this format: YYYY/MM/DD.txt. For instance, if you have an entry on May 5th, 2021 in a folder journal at ~/folderjournal, it will be located in: ~/folderjournal/2021/05/05.txt

Note

Creating a new folder journal can be done in two ways:

  • Create a folder with the name of the journal before running jrnl. Otherwise, when you run jrnl for the first time, it will assume that you are creating a single file journal instead, and it will create a file at that path.
  • Create a new journal in your config_file and end the path with a / (on a POSIX system like Linux or MacOSX) or a \ (on a Windows system). The folder will be created automatically if it doesn't exist.

Note

Folder journals can't be encrypted.

Day One Classic

jrnl supports the original data format used by DayOne. It's similar to the folder journal format, except it's identified by either of these characteristics:

  • the folder has a .dayone extension
  • the folder has a subfolder named entries

This is not to be confused with the DayOne 2.0 format, which is very different.

Note

DayOne Classic journals can't be encrypted.

Changing your journal type

You can't simply modify a journal's configuration to change its type. Instead, define a new journal as the type you'd like, and use piping to export your old journal as txt to an import command on your new journal.

For instance, if you have a projects journal you would like to import into a new journal, you would run the following after setting up the configuration for your new journal:

jrnl projects --format txt | jrnl new --import