Headline Feeds
Diary writing apps are nothing more than glorified text editors with a narrow focus. Keeping a daily diary for personal life commentary is a task that many people restrict to traditional paper-and-pen entries. Keeping a daily journal of work-related entries is more suited to electronic entries.
Regardless of the purpose, making diary entries in a dedicated text file or word processing document is the obvious starting point. However, over time, the sheer number of entries becomes a cataloging nightmare. Being able to find entries by dates or content falls to the mercy of the text editor's or word processor's search feature. Organizing entries by week or by month or by some other scheme requires constant attention.
These rudimentary file-management issues can easily get in the way. They often become a barrier that discourages you from continuing with diary entries. An alternative approach is to use a dedicated diary application. This type of software takes care of the basic file management chores so you can open the file and make an entry without getting bogged down in the process of record-keeping.
A fine line separates diary writing apps from note-taking apps. The process for both of these information entry tasks is basically the same. So if you are looking for an application to track your class notes or research paths, for instance, do not restrict your search to note-taking apps only.
Two good choices for your daily diary or journal writing pursuits are the Almanah Diary and the RedNotebook. Both of these apps run on the Gnome desktop and are readily available from the resident package management systems of the most popular Linux distros.
Software Summary
The Almanah Diary is a simple, small program that automatically encrypts your diary entries for safe keeping. You can edit entries within this diary keeper. A nice feature is the ability to add links to other content such as Web pages and files stored locally.
You can also check spelling, print some or all entries and view basic diary statistics. If you do not see the Almanah Diary in your distro's package manager, you can download it here.
The RedNotebook is a more detailed graphical diary manager. It is equally adept at tracking random journal entries of life commentaries or more substantial formal thoughts.
RedNotebook's features include easy calendar navigation, numerous customizable templates, export functionality and word clouds. It also lets you format, tag and search your entries, something that other diary and note apps do not offer.
If the RedNotebook is not available in your distro's software center, you can get it here or here.
Almanah Basics
This is not an app you should expect to see improved any time soon. It works as-is and has enough features to get the job done. A note on the Almanah page at live.gnome.org, presumably from the unnamed developer, states that a lack of time prevents anything but slow progress in doing much more with the application. But as I said, it is stable enough to use.
The interface resembles what you typically see with smartphone calendar apps, only the appearance looks better on a computer screen. The Almanah screen displays three panes.
The main pane is a spacious window for entering text under the date selected. This pane allows basic text formatting such as underline, bold and italic. The Format menu also lets you select the date and time for instant insertion at the cursor and to tag an entry as important.
A feature with considerable potential is the ability to insert definitions into the text entry. This feature resembles inserting a bookmark or link to another file or Web site. It works much the same way through the Add a Definition menu option.
Simple and Lightweight
Directions for using the Almanah Diary are non-existent, but using it is as simple as working with most very basic text editors such as Leafpad and gEdit. (See my review here.
The second pane is the calendar window. This serves as the navigation pointer for the entries. Click the left and right arrows to move to a month. Click on the day of the month to have that entry space appear in the main pane.
The program lacks any undo feature. So any text modifications you make must be removed my manually deleting the unwanted words or formatting. Another drawback is that while you can make entries for past and current dates, you cannot enter anything for a future date.
More Features
App writers seldom consider the needs of multiple-computer users. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to synchronize files as you move from computer to computer.
With this program, however, there is a manual work-around when making diary entries, for example, on a desktop and a laptop computer at different times. Almanah Diary stores its content in your home directory, under .local/share as "diary.db." So you can store a copy of the file on a thumb drive and copy it to this same location on all of your computers.
Exiting the program automatically saves the diary entries. This makes using Almanah Diary fairly foolproof. Plus, you can decide to enable automatic file encryption or turn off the encryption via the limited preferences option in the Edit menu.
RedNotebook Basics
Take the idea behind the simple design of the Almanah Diary and enhance its features and usefulness. The result is what you get with the RedNotebook. It lets you add files, links, images and notes divided into categories. Assigning tags to your entries adds a sophisticated way to organize the content.
Think of a photo management application with tags and other cool navigational features. That is the design that drives the RedNotebook.
On the left is the calendar. Click a day within any month to quickly see the content appear in the display panel in the center. The other component is the annotations panel to the right. Annotations are notes that elaborate on the basic diary entry. You can can easily sort annotations into categories.
Adding Clarity
Do not let the label of categories confuse you. It is not the day that you are categorizing. Rather, think of this feature as a topic. You can use topics to bring a sense of continuity to diary entries.
You could create several ongoing ideas that you highlight as you move from day to day in your entries. Take, for example, categories for maintaining a list of unusual things you did and things yet to do.
A cool thing about this type of organization is that you can export a particular category to generate a list of things related to specific dates. Related to this is another feature called "Word Cloud."
RedNotebook keeps track of your most often used words in the journal entries. You can click on the Clouds tab to view this list. Select your category or tag clouds by clicking on the scroll-down menu. Right click on any words in the cloud that you want removed. Or you can add these words to the blacklist menu in the Preferences menu option to filter them out.
To-Do List Too
You can use the RedNotebook for a combination of things to keep track of daily thoughts, activities and links to other reference files. You can also use it to maintain a running to-do list. The advantage to this feature is never having to enter a start or end date.
Just add the task on any day's entry. It stays there until you delete it. Just right click on the New Entry option. Enter "Todo" and add the task to remember in the fields. Then hit "OK."
To view your list at any time select the categories cloud from the drop down menu and click on "Todo." To show an item as done you can update the list by adding "--" around the item. To mark an item as important, add "**" around it. The item displays in bold text.
For more precise alerts, you can add Todo items to the targeted deadline day. Also, you can generate a list of completed tasks by changing an item's category name from "Todo" to "Done."
Other Nice Stuff
The RedNotebook has some nice advanced-level features. Besides spell-checking capability, it has the ability to export in PDF format, drag and drop content between entries and display markup highlighting. Plus, it automatically saves at set intervals and upon exit.
To facilitate use on multiple computers, you can save your journals on a remote server (SSH, FTP, WebDAV). The application by default makes zipped backup copies of all entries upon exit.
I love being able to insert images, files and links to websites. This
makes it very viable as a general note-taking program.
