🖋️ journal.nvim

journal.nvim is a highly extensible journaling system for Neovim.

✨ Features

• Create daily, weekly, monthly or yearly journal entries with sane defaults
• Extend your journal with custom entry types, allowing grouping, multiple journals and more
• Define custom templates for each entry type. Custom templates can contain date information such as the current weekday or month
• Flexible filesystem. flat or deeply-nested, group entries based on month or even hour of the day
• Everything exposed under a :Journal command, with auto-completion for all your entry types
• Linux, MacOS and Windows* support
• A cookbook of useful configurations from the community

📦 Installation

journal.nvim can be installed just like you install any other Neovim plugin.

Lazy.nvim

{
    "jakobkhansen/journal.nvim",
    config = function()
        require("journal").setup()
    end,
},

Packer.nvim

use {
    'jakobkhansen/journal.nvim',
    config = function()
        require('journal').setup()
    end
}

⚙️ Configuration

You can configure journal.nvim by passing a table to the setup function. The following table are the options and default values:

{
    filetype = 'md',                    -- Filetype to use for new journal entries
    root = '~/journal',                 -- Root directory for journal entries
    date_format = '%d/%m/%Y',           -- Date format for `:Journal <date-modifier>`
    autocomplete_date_modifier = "end", -- "always"|"never"|"end". Enable date modifier autocompletion

    -- Configuration for journal entries
    journal = {
        -- Default configuration for `:Journal <date-modifier>`
        format = '%Y/%m-%B/daily/%d-%A',
        template = '# %A %B %d %Y\n',
        frequency = { day = 1 },

        -- Nested configurations for `:Journal <type> <type> ... <date-modifier>`
        entries = {
            day = {
                format = '%Y/%m-%B/daily/%d-%A', -- Format of the journal entry in the filesystem.
                template = '# %A %B %d %Y\n',    -- Optional. Template used when creating a new journal entry
                frequency = { day = 1 },         -- Optional. The frequency of the journal entry. Used for `:Journal next`, `:Journal -2` etc
            },
            week = {
                format = '%Y/%m-%B/weekly/week-%W',
                template = "# Week %W %B %Y\n",
                frequency = { day = 7 },
                date_modifier = "monday" -- Optional. Date modifier applied before other modifier given to `:Journal`
            },
            month = {
                format = '%Y/%m-%B/%B',
                template = "# %B %Y\n",
                frequency = { month = 1 }
            },
            year = {
                format = '%Y/%Y',
                template = "# %Y\n",
                frequency = { year = 1 }
            },
        },
    }
}

All string values can be replaced by functions that return strings. format and template options also get a Date argument.

All format and template options are parsed with vim.fn.strftime. To see the available variables, see :h strftime and man strftime. Note that strftime can have different behavior based on platform.

🖋️ The :Journal command

:Journal <type> <type> ... <date-modifier> can be used to access all your journal entries. :Journal takes the following arguments:

• <type>: An entry type (e.g. day, week etc) to determine which entry type to open. Can be nested
• <date-modifier>. A date-modifier to determine which date the entry is for. If no date is provided, defaults to today. If date_modifier is specified for the given entry type, it is applied before the <date-modifier> argument is applied

Date-modifiers

The :Journal command can take a plethora of different date-modifiers to determine which entry should be opened:

• Weekdays (e.g. monday, tuesday...): The date for the current weeks instance of the given weekday
• Date-string (e.g. 10/05/2024): Parses the date-string to a date according to the date_format option
• +n/-n (e.g. -1, +5, ...): Relative date. Computes the relative date with n*frequency, meaning :Journal week -1 will go one week back, while :Journal day +1 will go one day forward
• last/next: Same as -1/+1
• n (e.g. 1, 18, ...): Gets the date for the nth day of the month

📚 Entries

Each entry type in the entries table correspond to a :Journal <type> command. Running :Journal <type> will create a journal entry file with a path given by the format option and fills the file with the template option. For example :Journal week could create an entry with the path 2024/05-May/weekly/week-19, pre-filled with the template # Week 19 May 2024.

Custom entry types

You can also define custom entry types in your journal by simply adding more entry types to the entries table. A quarter entry type could be configured like so:

{
    journal = {
        entries = {
            -- Entry type for each quarter of the year
            quarter = {
                -- strftime doesn't supply a quarter variable, so we compute it manually
                format = function(date)
                    local quarter = math.ceil(tonumber(os.date("%m", os.time(date.date))) / 3)
                    return "%Y/quarter/" .. quarter
                end,
                template = function(date)
                    local quarter = math.ceil(os.date("%m", os.time(date.date)) / 3)
                    return "# %Y Quarter " .. quarter .. "\n"
                end,
                frequency = { month = 3 },
            }
        }
    }
}

This entry type will generate entry paths such as 2024/quarter/2.md.

Nested entry types

You can also define nested entry types in your journal in order to group different entry types by adding an entries table to any of your entry types. This allows you to run commands such as :Journal groupA week and :Journal groupB week. Journal entries can be arbitrarily nested to support as much grouping as you want. The following table shows how you can create two groups with individual day and week entry types in separate folders.

{
    journal = {
        entries = {
            groupA = {
                -- `:Journal groupA`
                format = 'groupA/%Y/%m-%B/daily/%d-%A',
                template = "# Group A %A %B %d %Y\n",
                frequency = { day = 1 },

                entries = {
                    -- `:Journal groupA day`
                    day = {
                        format = 'groupA/%Y/%m-%B/daily/%d-%A',
                        template = "# Group A %A %B %d %Y\n",
                        frequency = { day = 1 },
                    },
                    -- `:Journal groupA week`
                    week = {
                        format = 'groupA/%Y/%m-%B/weekly/week-%W',
                        template = "# Group A Week %W %B %Y\n",
                        frequency = { day = 7 },
                        date_modifier = "monday"
                    },
                }
            },
            groupB = {
                -- `:Journal groupB`
                format = 'groupB/%Y/%m-%B/daily/%d-%A',
                template = "# Group B %A %B %d %Y\n",
                frequency = { day = 1 },

                entries = {
                    -- `:Journal groupB day`
                    day = {
                        format = 'groupB/%Y/%m-%B/daily/%d-%A',
                        template = "# Group B %A %B %d %Y\n",
                        frequency = { day = 1 },
                    },
                    -- `:Journal groupB week`
                    week = {
                        format = 'groupB/%Y/%m-%B/weekly/week-%W',
                        template = "# Group B Week %W %B %Y\n",
                        frequency = { day = 7 },
                        date_modifier = "monday"
                    },
                }
            },
        }
    }
}

Templates

journal.nvim allows you to specify templates for all of your entry types, which will be applied to any new entry file that is created. Your templates can contain date variables just like the format options (these are parsed with vim.fn.strftime). Additionally, just like formats, you can set a template to a function which returns a string and programatically build your template string. This could be used to for example take user input to set a title, or return completely different templates based on user choice (See vim.ui.select). The following example shows how you can set a dynamic title with vim.ui.input. Note that date variables in templates being passed to string.format needs to have %% instead of % as a prefix in order to be ignored by string.format.

template = function()
    local title = nil
    vim.ui.input({ prompt = 'Title: ' }, function(input) title = input end)
    return string.format("# %%Y %%B %%d: %s", title)
end

Based on user input, this template could produce headers such as # 2024 May 12: Custom title

Multiple journals

While grouping probably covers most users need for grouping different entries, it is also possible to have completely separate journal directories. One could achieve this by setting the root option to a common folder such as ~ and then specify the folders in the format of each entry type.

Another option is to set the root field to a function which returns the root directory of the journal. This function could return different directories based on cwd (uv.cwd()) or user input. The following function could be used to show a list of directories and let the user pick one:

{
    root = function()
        local journal_dir = nil
        vim.ui.select(
            { "~/journal1", "~/journal2" },
            { prompt = "Select journal directory" },
            function(selection) journal_dir = selection end
        )
        return journal_dir
    end,
}

🪟 Windows support

journal.nvim will work great for most users on Windows. However, due to the missing implementation of vim.fn.strptime, accessing a journal entry via the date-string date-modifier will not always work great. journal.nvim tries to translate the date_format option into a format which Get-Date in Windows can understand (but this is not a 1:1 mapping). This allows most sane date-formats to be used as datestrings, but expect to see issues if you use a complex date_format option on Windows.

Cookbook

The following section is a collection of configurations which the community have deemed useful. PRs for more examples in the cookbook are welcome!

week = {
    format = '%Y/%m-%B/weekly/week-%W',
    template = function(date)
        local sunday = date:relative({ day = 6 })
        local end_date = os.date('%A %d/%m', os.time(sunday.date))
        return "# Week %W - %A %d/%m -> " .. end_date .. "\n"
    end,
    frequency = { day = 7 },
    date_modifier = "monday"
}

local template =
[[
---
layout: post
title: "%Y %B %d"
categories: Blog
---
]]

require("journal").setup({
    root = '~/Documents/blog/_posts', -- Replace with your blog path
    journal = {
        format = '%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-post',
        frequency = { day = 1 },
        template = template
    }
})

template = function()
    local title = nil
    vim.ui.input({ prompt = 'Title: ' }, function(input) title = input end)
    return string.format(template, title)
end

local template = [[
---
layout: post
title: "%s"
categories: Blog
---
]]

require("journal").setup({
    filetype = 'norg',
    journal = {
        format = '%Y/%m/%d',
    }
})