Automating a daily journal with Joplin

I have a long-standing interest in personal knowledge management (PKM). I’ve tried lots and lots of different tools, and I recently learned about Joplin and decided to try it out. Requirements, or “Is that too much to ask?” There’s not a lot of specific things I want out of a PKM tool, but I’ve had a hard time getting them all together in a single product. My must-haves are: Absolutely minimal time-to-capture, so as not to interrupt flow Some sort of hierarchical organization, so I have a place to stash notes that aren’t currently pertinent but are worth keeping around for future reference Some sort of search functionality (I’m not above running grep -r on a directory of text files) Some sort of backup or sync mechanism (similarly, /5 git commit -a && git push would suffice) Some mechanism for tracking a daily journal so I know what I accomplished over the last day/week/month; this was a habit I picked up from PlannerMode, which should give you an idea of how long I’ve been shaving this particular yak Joplin manages most of these: I used Automator to make a global keyboard shortcut to get quick access to write a new note Notebooks and sub-notebooks are arbitrarily nestable, QED Search works fine, and the cmd-G “Goto anything” feature is handy (if incomplete since you cannot “go” to notebooks) Dropbox sync, that works However, Joplin does not have a daily journal built-in. Since this was the only major shortcoming, I decided to hack something together. tl;dr show me the code Joplin does have an API, but reading through the docs for it was painful so I decided to just run the command-line version too and automate it. I created a script named journal.sh that I can run at any time to create a new template-based file with today’s date in the appropriate notebook, and then I can go fill it out with the day’s work. $ cat ~/bin/journal.sh #!/bin/bash TMPDIR=mktemp -d TMPFILE=$TMPDIR/$(date +"%Y-%m-%d") cat >$TMPFILE <