Thank you so much for this app. It has been helping me journal my mental health. I always found it hard to write it down in a notebook and I HATE using phone notes or Word/Google docs.
This app is literally perfect for my personal Journal Laptop.
5/5 Again, thank you so much, its life changing for me.
I need help I don't know how to install the portable version TT. It keeps saying that my ffmpeg.dll was not found even though there was an ffmpeg.dll file in there ?? the 1.0 version opened fine ?
i was trying to find a reason why for about 2 hours. today i just woke up, and the app just, worked. idk if this helped anyone. but what i did was uninstall and reinstall it until i see the ffmpeg.dll, i shut down my computer and ye, sleep for 8 hours.
I get here to make a comment how I like that if I insert a picture the app save that image in the journal file encoded in base64 and that way it saved with the journal entry and remain after years and years.
I think this little program is good. It lacks a few features but it's good.
So I'm a little sad now that I saw the abandonware notice.
Thanks blarfnip for this little application.
I never wrote a journal before. I don't know why. Maybe I didn't see the use of it.
Then I tried JRNL a few weeks ago and a few times a week I wrote about my day.
I wrote down my accomplishments, however small they may be.
I wrote about my positive moments in my day.
Somehow it's feels good. I don't really know why. I just write down that's already happened. It's not a fantasy or something.
I really love this app and have started to use it daily. I know it has a spell checker but it would be cool if it had auto correct or even suggestions. It ends up telling me I spelled a word wrong and then I have to google the correct way to spell it.
Very nice tool! I've been using this now and then for about half a year. Is this still in development? I hope there will be feature such as attaching word/video files, and keyword searching (which would be helpful when looking back) in the future.
Hey all! quick question here, not sure if i'll get a response. How would I run an export of my previous journals? Just wanted to test the functionality and I can't spot it within the portable version.
Hello! I love this tool, I've been using it for daily journaling for about a week now. However, after a recent power outage at my house, my PC disconnected from the internet and reconnected when it powered back on. Now I'm getting an error, which I have included below. Can you please help me fix this? I can provide more details if asked. I'd love to continue to use this journaling tool, any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Got this in the charity bundle! Just wanted to say thank you for making such a wonderful little app. It has been extremely helpful for me! Love the minimalist approach.
This is a very usefull software that makes daily journaling easier by automatically tracking and assigning entries to dates. And I dont know anything that suites this specific function so easily while being simple and quick to start So I really appreciate it. I want to give this a good rating but as of now there is some polish and maybe additional features I'd like to see first. And I dont know if I can change my rating after I give one. as of now I would give this 4/5. Partially because right now I dont know anything as well designed as this for this specific purpose. Obsidian has great features and customization but set up is genuinely daunting. And I think with time this journal could strike the perfect balance. (also props for being visually appealing)
Bug I noticed: sometimes the format pop up behaves strangely and I click through it rather than the buttons themselves. When this happens I have to click the bottom 1/4th of the button in order to get it to work. This only occurs when the window starts running out of space towards the bottom of the screen.
Feature Suggestions (if planning to develop this further)
Hotkey config
Custom font choice for accessibility. You could make it uploadedable but having the OpenDyslexic font family built in would also be GREATLY appreciated. (I have Dyslexia)
Multiple calendar views you can switch between, previewing a whole year, a month, or a week.
option to show the day number on the boxes, on-hover, or both as options.
Option to preview entry on hover
Checkboxes, maybe counters too. (counters might be redundant)
I love using this, I've been journalling consistently for about a month now, where I used to always fall off after doing it a couple of times. Really simple, and easy to use, and looks great.
Today I don't know what I might have touched but when I opened JRNL I noticed there was a formatting bar at the top of the window with a box around my text area. I could also pull up something at the bottom which produced a blank white area where text didn't go, and which I could adjust by pulling it again.
I like this formatting bar (usually only appears if I highlight text), and I even realized I could change the font from this!
For the record, this unusual state did not happen on subsequent launches of JRNL. So all it took to "solve" this was just restarting JRNL. Though ironically I actually kinda like it better in that odd state...
I downloaded the portable one because I prefer portable versions of things if possible. I had to edit the config.json because the window size defaulted to wider than my screen and the gear icon was impossible to find, as well as the close button.
So... if someone else has issues use notepad++ to edit the "width" and "height" in the "WindowBounds" section.
Also reading other replies I see I could have just double clicked the top bar. Oh well, Live and learn!
I downloaded the 1.0.0 one because I assumed Portable meant it was for Android devices. It didn't have a settings button, and the few paragraphs that I put into the first entry yesterday, the first journal entry I've made in years, was deleted when I sat down at my computer today. This already feels like a breach of trust for a program meant to safeguard my thoughts.
I'll give the 2.0.0 and JRNL one more try. The settings tray works, but we'll see if it decides to delete my entry instead of safeguarding it the next day.
Hey, just a little bug! The journal loses all writing you've done from the time you change the "close-to-tray" settings to the time you restart the app. In other words, after changing those specific settings, nothing from that point on will be saved until after you restart JRNL.
I'm liking this so far! I got this in a charity bundle, and I'm pleasantly surprised that this tool seems pretty useful.
Does anyone know where in the config file I can modify the font? I happened to need to type something that makes it very unclear whether things are lowercase o's or zeros...
I love the 2.0 update, I'm glad I switched to the portable version. There are a couple of issues when running it on Windows 10 though.
1) "open config file" and "show config file in explorer" buttons do nothing for me. I manually found the file anyways since it's in the same folder as the exe, but still.
2) There is a small visual issue, as shown even in your gifs, that with some themes the "< >" have two small dark dots, which are very visible when using a light color for the "selected entry color" setting.
3) I can't seem to find the pdf manual that other people are talking about in the comments?
Finally two suggestions:
1) it would be nice if the month names were customizable or if they'd follow the spellcheck language (i.e. in my language - Italian - the abbreviations are GFMAMGLASOND instead of JFMAMJJASOND)
2) It would be a QoL improvement if the spellcheck enable/disable and the language picker were in the cogwheel settings instead of having to go to %appdata%\jrnl and manually edit the code. Again not a big issue for some of us, but others might find it bothersome.
All in all I love the software, it's a bit unpolished/tech-savvy but it's really good imho. Most journaling tools for Windows are ugly as hell or absolutely impractical, while this is very aesthetically pleasing and minimal while still being functional.
hullo! i love this program, but i was stupid enough to click somewhere so that the upper text editor line disappeared -- now it's accessed by left-clicking on text. i'd be fine with it, if not for the fact i don't know how to edit tables now, since left-clicking summons text editor when before it'd have prompts for removing or adding a column.
any advice is appreciated bc i need dat table to have more columns and i'm woefully ignorant in computer science ways.
I plan on opening this on startup and was curious if you knew a way to get it to start minimized in the taskbar.
I program games in my free time and was curious if you wouldn't mind sharing how you got your app to minimize to the taskbar? I want to make an organizational tool for storing code snippets that can minimize like your journal app and I have no idea where to begin.
I think Windows' folder structure is mostly the same between 7, 8, and 10. Try pasting %appdata%\jrnl into Windows Explorer's address bar. That should get you into the right directory with the Preferences file. Opening the Run dialog (Windows key + R) and pasting the same thing in there should also work.
Strange. That should've disabled spellchecking unless I made a mistake with the code I gave you. Did you close JRNL before editing the Preferences file, or restart it afterwards?
For what it's worth, the original version of my file looked identical to yours. I deleted en-US from the dictionaries list, and JRNL added a few other spellcheck-disabling entries on its own when I next started it. You could try one last thing and replace the contents of "Preferences" with the following (make sure you've quit JRNL first):
If that still doesn't work, there's a spellCheckattribute in JRNL\resources\app\summernote.js you could try setting to false. I'm hesitant to test it on my end for fear of possibly breaking something, but hey, might work for you.
Hopefully the author will come along and add a spellchecker toggle to the configuration menu, as well as fix that other entry-wiping bug I mentioned in another comment below.
Unfortunately, I don't really know of any alternative journal software, as I only started journaling again after discovering this app through the Ukraine bundle.
I would be willing to pay a monthly fee if this thing had cloud support to allow me to view the same journal across different devices and on mobile as well ideally.
The entries are saved to text files in Documents\JRNL Entries; having an auto backup/sync of that folder via cloud service should work as DIY solution.
Documents\JRNL Entries is the default file path. If you have OneDrive have it back up your documents folder (or you can have it specifically back up JRNL). If you don't have OneDrive you can sign up for a free account with 5 GB of storage. Even if you write a lot it would be years before you would use up that storage using JRNL back ups only. If you have any issues setting it up let me know and I can send links to tutorials.
This is a great app that has reignited my habit of writing daily, but there seems to be a nasty bug that wipes the last-open entry when JRNL is closed. I don't know what exactly is behind it (possibly Summernote unloading early and causing the program to overwrite the journal file with empty data?), but until the author releases a fix, to prevent this on my end I've disabled save-on-close by commenting out the saveFile() line under the windowClose event trigger in JRNL\resources\app\body.js, like so:
Downside is you need to be sure to hit Ctrl+S or load another day to save the current entry before closing JRNL, but it beats randomly losing an entire entry on shutdown.
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Thank you so much for this app. It has been helping me journal my mental health. I always found it hard to write it down in a notebook and I HATE using phone notes or Word/Google docs.
This app is literally perfect for my personal Journal Laptop.
5/5 Again, thank you so much, its life changing for me.
I need help I don't know how to install the portable version TT. It keeps saying that my ffmpeg.dll was not found even though there was an ffmpeg.dll file in there ?? the 1.0 version opened fine ?
i was trying to find a reason why for about 2 hours. today i just woke up, and the app just, worked. idk if this helped anyone. but what i did was uninstall and reinstall it until i see the ffmpeg.dll, i shut down my computer and ye, sleep for 8 hours.
I get here to make a comment how I like that if I insert a picture the app save that image in the journal file encoded in base64 and that way it saved with the journal entry and remain after years and years.
I think this little program is good. It lacks a few features but it's good.
So I'm a little sad now that I saw the abandonware notice.
Thanks blarfnip for this little application.
I never wrote a journal before. I don't know why. Maybe I didn't see the use of it.
Then I tried JRNL a few weeks ago and a few times a week I wrote about my day.
I wrote down my accomplishments, however small they may be.
I wrote about my positive moments in my day.
Somehow it's feels good. I don't really know why. I just write down that's already happened. It's not a fantasy or something.
Just a journal.
I really love this app and have started to use it daily. I know it has a spell checker but it would be cool if it had auto correct or even suggestions. It ends up telling me I spelled a word wrong and then I have to google the correct way to spell it.
i would do anything for an image embed option!!!
Would also like to know how to open the settings :3
The settings gear is in the bottom right corner of the JRNL window.
I don't see any gears unfortunately.
I think there is no "settings" button in the installer version, only in the portable one (which is the 2.0).
it's only in 2.0 :]
Very nice tool! I've been using this now and then for about half a year. Is this still in development? I hope there will be feature such as attaching word/video files, and keyword searching (which would be helpful when looking back) in the future.
How do i open the settings?
In 2.0 (portable version) there is an icon of gears at bottom right. In 1.0 I guess it's either no settings or changing it in the settings file
Hey all! quick question here, not sure if i'll get a response. How would I run an export of my previous journals? Just wanted to test the functionality and I can't spot it within the portable version.
Hello! I love this tool, I've been using it for daily journaling for about a week now. However, after a recent power outage at my house, my PC disconnected from the internet and reconnected when it powered back on. Now I'm getting an error, which I have included below. Can you please help me fix this? I can provide more details if asked. I'd love to continue to use this journaling tool, any help is appreciated. Thanks!
YMMV, but after installing the non-portable version I was able to run the portable one just fine even from removable storage. Hope this helps.
Got this in the charity bundle! Just wanted to say thank you for making such a wonderful little app. It has been extremely helpful for me! Love the minimalist approach.
This is a very usefull software that makes daily journaling easier by automatically tracking and assigning entries to dates. And I dont know anything that suites this specific function so easily while being simple and quick to start So I really appreciate it. I want to give this a good rating but as of now there is some polish and maybe additional features I'd like to see first. And I dont know if I can change my rating after I give one. as of now I would give this 4/5. Partially because right now I dont know anything as well designed as this for this specific purpose. Obsidian has great features and customization but set up is genuinely daunting. And I think with time this journal could strike the perfect balance. (also props for being visually appealing)
Bug I noticed: sometimes the format pop up behaves strangely and I click through it rather than the buttons themselves. When this happens I have to click the bottom 1/4th of the button in order to get it to work. This only occurs when the window starts running out of space towards the bottom of the screen.
Feature Suggestions (if planning to develop this further)
I love using this, I've been journalling consistently for about a month now, where I used to always fall off after doing it a couple of times. Really simple, and easy to use, and looks great.
How can I turn off the spellchecker?
The portable version won't open for me, is there anything i should do? Like decrompress all of the pak files?
Today I don't know what I might have touched but when I opened JRNL I noticed there was a formatting bar at the top of the window with a box around my text area. I could also pull up something at the bottom which produced a blank white area where text didn't go, and which I could adjust by pulling it again.
I like this formatting bar (usually only appears if I highlight text), and I even realized I could change the font from this!
But, what caused this to appear?
For the record, this unusual state did not happen on subsequent launches of JRNL. So all it took to "solve" this was just restarting JRNL. Though ironically I actually kinda like it better in that odd state...
I downloaded the portable one because I prefer portable versions of things if possible. I had to edit the config.json because the window size defaulted to wider than my screen and the gear icon was impossible to find, as well as the close button.
So... if someone else has issues use notepad++ to edit the "width" and "height" in the "WindowBounds" section.
Also reading other replies I see I could have just double clicked the top bar. Oh well, Live and learn!
I downloaded the 1.0.0 one because I assumed Portable meant it was for Android devices. It didn't have a settings button, and the few paragraphs that I put into the first entry yesterday, the first journal entry I've made in years, was deleted when I sat down at my computer today. This already feels like a breach of trust for a program meant to safeguard my thoughts.
I'll give the 2.0.0 and JRNL one more try. The settings tray works, but we'll see if it decides to delete my entry instead of safeguarding it the next day.
Hey, just a little bug! The journal loses all writing you've done from the time you change the "close-to-tray" settings to the time you restart the app. In other words, after changing those specific settings, nothing from that point on will be saved until after you restart JRNL.
Hey are you working on an android version perhaps, this could be really neat for my morning schedule.
It doesn't support spanish characters when exporting to html :/
I'm liking this so far! I got this in a charity bundle, and I'm pleasantly surprised that this tool seems pretty useful.
Does anyone know where in the config file I can modify the font? I happened to need to type something that makes it very unclear whether things are lowercase o's or zeros...
How do I access the settings menu?
The gear in the bottom right corner
I noticed that I couldn't see the gear and so I resized my window and found it. You may need to do that.
Why the settings menu goes missing time to time :...3
Absolutley love it!
A feature I would love to see would be to allow for the use of different fonts! Cant be a good journal without comic sans
Also, as has also been meantioned by another user, disabling spell checker would be really nice :)
I love the 2.0 update, I'm glad I switched to the portable version. There are a couple of issues when running it on Windows 10 though.
1) "open config file" and "show config file in explorer" buttons do nothing for me. I manually found the file anyways since it's in the same folder as the exe, but still.
2) There is a small visual issue, as shown even in your gifs, that with some themes the "< >" have two small dark dots, which are very visible when using a light color for the "selected entry color" setting.
3) I can't seem to find the pdf manual that other people are talking about in the comments?
Finally two suggestions:
1) it would be nice if the month names were customizable or if they'd follow the spellcheck language (i.e. in my language - Italian - the abbreviations are GFMAMGLASOND instead of JFMAMJJASOND)
2) It would be a QoL improvement if the spellcheck enable/disable and the language picker were in the cogwheel settings instead of having to go to %appdata%\jrnl and manually edit the code. Again not a big issue for some of us, but others might find it bothersome.
All in all I love the software, it's a bit unpolished/tech-savvy but it's really good imho. Most journaling tools for Windows are ugly as hell or absolutely impractical, while this is very aesthetically pleasing and minimal while still being functional.
hello! my jrnl does not have the lil gear tool in the bottom right corner, should i download the portable one instead to have that??
hullo! i love this program, but i was stupid enough to click somewhere so that the upper text editor line disappeared -- now it's accessed by left-clicking on text. i'd be fine with it, if not for the fact i don't know how to edit tables now, since left-clicking summons text editor when before it'd have prompts for removing or adding a column.
any advice is appreciated bc i need dat table to have more columns and i'm woefully ignorant in computer science ways.
oh, and apparently it didn't save my last entry in its entirety despite me clickin ctrl+s. :(
heyyy, uh. i just got a blank
screenwindow after installing jrnl. i cant do anything with it.I plan on opening this on startup and was curious if you knew a way to get it to start minimized in the taskbar.
I program games in my free time and was curious if you wouldn't mind sharing how you got your app to minimize to the taskbar? I want to make an organizational tool for storing code snippets that can minimize like your journal app and I have no idea where to begin.
Is there a way to disable spellcheck???
I didn't have spellcheck enabled yesterday.
But now It's on and I can't find a way to disable it.
I write in swedish, so now I have a red line under almost every word, it's super distracting and ruins the experience for me totally.
If it wasn't for these problems, and some bugs described below, I would give the program 5/5 stars.
Try overwriting the contents of your Preferences file (should be in %appdata%\jrnl) with the following:
{"browser":{"enable_spellchecking":false},"spellcheck":{"dictionaries":["en-US"],"dictionary":"","use_spelling_service":false}}Of course, make a backup of the original file, just in case.
Thanks for trying to help.
I have file named config.json
and main.js
In the JRNL directory.
I don't think I have any "appdata" folder since I'm on Windows 7 and not Windows 10.
I think Windows' folder structure is mostly the same between 7, 8, and 10. Try pasting %appdata%\jrnl into Windows Explorer's address bar. That should get you into the right directory with the Preferences file. Opening the Run dialog (Windows key + R) and pasting the same thing in there should also work.
Ok. I didn't know about the "appdata" folder, and its purpose.
The "Preferences" file looked like this:
{"spellcheck":{"dictionaries":["en-US"],"dictionary":""}}
I tried your suggestion:
{"browser":{"enable_spellchecking":false},"spellcheck":{"dictionaries":["en-US"],"dictionary":"","use_spelling_service":false}}
and this:
{"spellcheck":{"enable_spellchecking":false},"dictionaries":["en-US"],"dictionary":"","use_spelling_service":false}}
..but I didn't make it work.
I have started to look for other journaling software that are also minimalist.
I found s Rednotebook(free), and Journal/Simple Journal here on Itch.
I liked JRNL the best. But I can´t stand it when I can't remove the spellcheck.
Do you have any suggestion for other similar programs?
Strange. That should've disabled spellchecking unless I made a mistake with the code I gave you. Did you close JRNL before editing the Preferences file, or restart it afterwards?
For what it's worth, the original version of my file looked identical to yours. I deleted en-US from the dictionaries list, and JRNL added a few other spellcheck-disabling entries on its own when I next started it. You could try one last thing and replace the contents of "Preferences" with the following (make sure you've quit JRNL first):
{"spellcheck":{"dictionaries":[""],"dictionary":""}}
If that still doesn't work, there's a spellCheck attribute in JRNL\resources\app\summernote.js you could try setting to false. I'm hesitant to test it on my end for fear of possibly breaking something, but hey, might work for you.
Hopefully the author will come along and add a spellchecker toggle to the configuration menu, as well as fix that other entry-wiping bug I mentioned in another comment below.
Unfortunately, I don't really know of any alternative journal software, as I only started journaling again after discovering this app through the Ukraine bundle.
I installed the "portable" version.
I really felt stressed out today.
Wanted to write down my thoughts to get a bit clear in my head.
So it was not a good day to have technical difficulties.
I don't know if I should put that code, if it's inside some other code block etc..
thank you, this fix worked for me.
I would be willing to pay a monthly fee if this thing had cloud support to allow me to view the same journal across different devices and on mobile as well ideally.
The entries are saved to text files in Documents\JRNL Entries; having an auto backup/sync of that folder via cloud service should work as DIY solution.
Documents\JRNL Entries is the default file path. If you have OneDrive have it back up your documents folder (or you can have it specifically back up JRNL). If you don't have OneDrive you can sign up for a free account with 5 GB of storage. Even if you write a lot it would be years before you would use up that storage using JRNL back ups only. If you have any issues setting it up let me know and I can send links to tutorials.
yeah nice burp and fart
This is a great app that has reignited my habit of writing daily, but there seems to be a nasty bug that wipes the last-open entry when JRNL is closed. I don't know what exactly is behind it (possibly Summernote unloading early and causing the program to overwrite the journal file with empty data?), but until the author releases a fix, to prevent this on my end I've disabled save-on-close by commenting out the saveFile() line under the windowClose event trigger in JRNL\resources\app\body.js, like so:
ipcRenderer.on('windowClose',(event, arg) => { if(autoSaveInterval != null) { clearInterval(autoSaveInterval); } saveConfig(); //saveFile(currentDateString); });Downside is you need to be sure to hit Ctrl+S or load another day to save the current entry before closing JRNL, but it beats randomly losing an entire entry on shutdown.
why does it keep deleting my entries right after i write them this is so irritating