Crazy toolchain for journal: org-mode is forever

Posted by jaslar
Mar 17, 2021 at 04:35 PM

I’ve been keeping journals for a long time. Mostly, the practice is just for reflecting on the day. I rarely go back and read them, although on occasion I search for something.

My electronic journals began with KAMAS, from about 1983 to 1989. Then I moved to tkoutline—and managed to import my KAMAS files (after exporting them to text, I think). I fiddled around for a while with hnb (and later, with its fork, tines), mostly because of its import/export formats. It helped me consolidate all my files into one. I think I messed with Freemind for a while. Then I started with a new program (Notecase, where I lived for about 8 years), but without importing older years. Then I moved to Dynalist, but made no attempt to move my past journals there, because I didn’t want to put private files in the cloud.

But I’d like to have a comprehensive file of my journals in one non-proprietary and private format.

To show how weird this gets, I spent a couple hours last night exporting tines files to OPML, then exporting Dynalist to OPML. then importing both of them into Elementary OS’s Outliner. Outliner, I discovered, also has the ability to export to org-mode!

So now I have an Outliner file (still missing the Notecase files), an OPML backup, and an org-mode backup. But that last format is probably the most portable and enduring.

And why am I doing this? The short answer: because I’m CRIMPING. The somewhat longer answer: over time, we migrate from one operating system or app or file format to another. While most files can be abandoned, a few may be worth the bother of conversion. Plain text does seem to be the safest bet.

It would be best, I imagine, to just create the files in org-mode, but that probably won’t happen (that CRIMPing again). It’s good to know, though, that I can usually get them to org-mode in the end.

So for all you other journalers out there, what software have you used over the long haul, and do you have consolidated files?