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Keeping and using a journal - a record of daily activities

It's useful to keep a detailed record of daily activities. There is often a need to refer back to previous activities. The journal keeping utilities described below allow you to keep these records as a set of plain text files. This is convenient for searching and inspecting them with standard utilities.

Setup

Create a directory with the name "journal" in your home directory and initialise it for Mercurial.

    hg init ~/journal
      

Copy the text of the files listed below into executable files of the same name in your PATH.

Use

Type "journal" at a command line to dropped into vi editing a file with today's name in which to record your journal notes.

"startjournal" is just a convenient utility invoked by "journal" to set up a new journal for the current day.

"yj" is used for reviewing recent journal entries. It takes as parameters a list of numbers or ranges, which is how many days ago to show the journals of. A range is a pair of numbers separated by a hyphen, no spaces, e.g. "5-10" to look at a previous week's journal entries.

"jnlgrep" looks for a single word in the journal and shows all lines which containt.

"jnlview" is like jnlgrep but shows each file by calling the less utility.