Playing with jrnl and testing an alternative

I discovered Jrnl this past week and had a play. Nice toy. I installed it in my personal Python environment and tested it out.

What struck me immediately was how many modules it installed; there were at least 15 in there, each one doing one specific task.

I gave up after 10 minutes, wondering why this is so complicated to post single-line entries into a text file. Jrnl does have a beautiful display for when you want to read back your entries, but that, I feel, is more overkill.

I’m not rubbishing Jrnl - a lot of thought and hard work has gone into it, clearly. It is a cool little tool with features such as tagging, search and back-dated entries which can be added in plain-language format like “yesterday”.

Do I recommend it? Yes, if you are looking for a full-featured command line journal tool. Check it out here: https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/

Replicating Jrnl with native Linux .bashrc

I was curious. I wanted to see whether I could have the same-ish functionality, but by using what I already have (no new dependencies).

In my .bashrc, I added:

write() { echo -e "\n$(TZ=UTC date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z') \n$*" >> ~/Documents/journal.txt; }

• -e is to enable interpretation of backslash escapes. This is to add gaps between the entries.
• date with time zone is on its own line.
• $* takes the command line entry and,
• outputs it to the file.

The command can be a single-line entry like this:

write Hello world! This is text in one line.

The journal file is updated and looks like this:

2025-11-09 08:27:10 UTC 
Hello world! This is text in one line.

Multi-line entries can be added like so:

write 'This is the second entry.\nWith a new line.\nAnd another.'

And the resulting journal file now contains this:

2025-11-09 08:27:10 UTC 
Hello world! This is text in one line.

2025-11-09 08:29:33 UTC 
This is the second entry.
With a new line.
And another.

With my solution, I can have multi-line entries, something I could not figure out how to do in Jrnl. Come to think about it now, perhaps entries with Jrnl need to be entered in the same way.

I personally do not have a use case for something like this — I prefer to use a text editor.