A couple of weeks ago I read a lovely story in The New Yorker by Calvin Tompkins about starting a journal in his hundredth year. Tompkins was born the same year that The New Yorker was founded and, ironically, spent most of his working life writing for the magazine. Last year—his hundredth—he surprised himself by deciding to start a journal as a sort of countdown to his hundredth birthday. The story is mostly entries from the journal but I found them fascinating. Perhaps you will too. If nothing else, you’ll get a first hand glimpse of what old age really looks like. The TL;DR is that there’s good news and bad news.
In any event—although I am nowhere near my hundredth year—I was inspired to start my own journal. Of course, it was going to be written with Emacs but the question is how. There is the builtin journal app as well as some third party packages but I chose simplicity. I didn’t need anything special or complex with arcane functions so I just added an Org capture template to create a file+datetree file in Org mode. Here’s the whole thing:
("J" "Personal Journal" entry (file+datetree "~/org/personal-journal.org") "* %<%R: >%? \n%t" :empty-lines-before 1)
I have some startup options in the file itself to set visual-line-mode, use a variable pitch mode, and couple of other things: the same setup that I use for my blog posts. All this is simple and familiar. There’s nothing new for me to learn since it’s basically the same setup that I use everyday to write my Irreal posts.
The takeaway is that if you’d like to start a journal, it’s really easy. Just use a simple Org file with a corresponding capture template.