As you all know by now, I’m all in on Journelly. I use it to implement my memo book in which I record virtually everything that happens in my day. For me, one of its major benefits is that it uses Org mode markup to record its data and can (optionally) export it to the iCloud so that I can interact with it on my Mac, which sees the data as a normal Org file.
“Interact” means that I can read, edit, and add to the data in my memo book from any of my devices including my Mac. It’s a lot better than I expected it would be compared to my previous procedure of using the Apple Notes app. I find that I take better, more comprehensive notes and can easily add pictures and links to things on the Web.
That brings me to a post on the Emacs subreddit from TeeMcBee that asks how people interact with Journelly from their Mac. It’s a natural question, especially for those who haven’t been involved with Journelly from the beginning. In the comments, Álvero Ramírez offers up his own solution, which is similar but identical to mine. Our main difference is where we export the data to. The easiest thing is to simply choose iCloud Drive as your storage option. That’s what Ramírez does.
The problem with that option is that it stores the data at a place with a complicated path in the iCloud. Because of that, I chose to use the Other… option and directed it to a subdirectory of my Documents folder. I thought that that would avoid having to set symlink to the file. It turns out, though, that it was still easier to set a symlink so I recommend that you choose the iCloud Drive option and set a symlink to it from wherever is convenient.
The TL;DR of all this is to do the simplest thing for exporting your data and then read Ramírez’s post on setting up an Org mode template to capture Journelly entries from your Mac. Those two things will make using Journelly data on your Mac easy and pleasant..