Journaling, a simplistic view

Posted by Amontillado
Jul 21, 2018 at 01:12 AM

I’ve decided to take up journaling, at least as long as the habit will stick, and decided on a few requirements.

Not on paper. I don’t do that.

All content must be completely recoverable if the journaling software evaporates.

I need to be able to add any file type.

I want tags in hierarchies, and flexible sorting and searching.

There is probably a better way to do what I want, but so far DEVONThink looks like a reasonable option. I’ve started with a group for the year, with subgroups for months, with RTF files for day entries.

I named the first two months “06 - June” and “07 - July”, and day entries in the form “19 July, Thursday”. That was so they would sort chronologically.

Then I discovered if you choose unsorted for the contents of a group, the order you set is persistent. You can change back and forth between sort options without losing your unsorted order. Unfortunately, not all of the views allow fine grained sort options. In the three pane view, the sort order for the left-hand, vertical pane is global. You get the same sort order for the whole thing. I like that sorted by kind, which causes subgroups to appear as alphabetically sorted. July comes before June, until you switch back to any other view.

Oh, well, the two pane view isn’t half bad. I think I may like it better, anyway, and switching to three-pane doesn’t trash my manual ordering.

DEVONThink has an industrial look to it, but I’m tolerant of that. I’m intolerant of losing data, and DEVONThink is the only thing of its type I’ve used that has been rock solid.

I think it works great, and it might as well be free. After all, if you haven’t installed DEVONThink, you should, and since it’s already there, why not keep a journal in it? :-)

Yes, yes, I know. Mileage varies.