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Styling a Markdown one-line journal in Emacs

I like the idea of making a one-line journal, whether on paper or in some flavor of text file. I’ve tried it a handful of times, but nothing ever stuck. However! I think this new way has the best chance of being lightweight, nice-looking, and easy to update from anywhere.

I’d forgotten about George Coghill’s The One-Line-Per-Day, One-Page Plain Text Daily Journal until yesterday and that gave me the boost I needed. Here’s what I’m doing, which borrows a lot from his formatting:

I have a one-line-journal.md file in Dropbox that I open in Emacs (or in 1Writer on the phone) and it looks like this:

one page of Markdown-formatted one-line journal entries in Emacs

My favorite part of all this is this section of init.el that tells Emacs to format anything that looks like 2024-12-29 Sun in a Markdown file as white + bold. I could make this more robust by changing it to only affect dates that start in the first column of a line, and only match actual days of the week instead of three random alpha characters, but I use Markdown so little in Emacs other than this file that I can live with this setup. And no, I didn’t know how to do this and got ChatGPT to write it:

(defun my-markdown-highlight-dates ()
  "Highlight ISO dates followed by a three-letter day abbreviation in red."
  (font-lock-add-keywords
   nil
   '(("\\b\\([0-9]\\{4\\}-[0-9]\\{2\\}-[0-9]\\{2\\} [A-Z][a-z]\\{2\\}\\)\\b"
      1 '(:weight bold :foreground "white") t))))

(add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook #'my-markdown-highlight-dates)

I separate all the micro-entries in each day with a bullet, which I can type with the snippet of blt. This is handled by abbrev-mode, which turns on automatically with this line in init.el:

(setq-default abbrev-mode t)

December 29, 2024 journal Emacs regex

Weeknotes 7

  • Because linkding is so good at managing bookmarks, I’m not going to include a kitchen sink list of potentially interesting links in the Weeknotes series anymore. I will include a shorter list of stuff that I’ve actually tried and adopted or read fully, or things that have made the internal compass recalibrate itself. The rest are in my linkding instance (also at the Bookmarks link in the menu above).
  • I went back to Safari after using Arc for a good long time. I will say that Arc kept me out of a lot of open-tab bankruptcy, but I always felt like I never knew where something would open when I used it. I never cared for the way the login page for my bank’s website would stay open in the background while the accounts page would open in a floating window above it after I signed in. And I don’t need my downloaded files renamed with A.I., although that was neat the first time I saw it work. With Safari, there is one row of tabs, nothing closes by accident until I close it myself, and my phone and laptop are always in sync.
  • “Jack Baty” is a cool name!
  • Hearing Luc Beaudoin on Hookmark on The Informed Life makes me want to understand Hookmark, which I have never gotten. I like his belief that you should be able to get to anything you need within two seconds. Also that relying on search to find emails, notes, and documents (instead of direct links) can too easily distract you from the thing you were looking for.
  • 50.5% of voters elected President #45 again. I don’t have much to add that isn’t already covered in someone else’s hot take. I realize Democrats are out of touch and Trump voters are playing an entirely different game, but he also wouldn’t spend so much time being a belligerent racist, xenophobe, queerphobe if he didn’t think that would appeal to a lot of people. Whatever was behind it, I was blindsided, got through the stages of grief in record time, and now I’m just resigned. Getting wound up every day of his first term was completely unproductive. I have things to learn about all the reasons that got others to the point where voting for him didn’t make them want to vomit.
  • Deleted my Twitter account. Don’t miss it.
  • The bathroom mold remediation began today. Our sole toilet is disconnected and we’re using a camping toilet — a seat with a hole and a bio-bag — on the screened back porch. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be!
  • The Diplomat on Netflix is so, so great. I needed something this well-shot and expertly acted.
  • And Leave the World Behind (2023) on Netflix is incredible. Gonna take me all night to calm down from it.

Music

November 9, 2024 weeknotes bookmarks

Using linkding for bookmarks

I saw everyone hopping on the linkding train for keeping bookmarks and figured there must be something there. It turns out, there is! I’m using a PikaPods trial to host it and have a couple more months left using their $5 credit. My list is at: https://bookmarks.twelvety.net/bookmarks/shared

Before that, I used Bear because it was so trivially easy to add things to it from a Shortcut. Instead of “Markdown notes you’ll love”, Bear became a place to hoard links to websites, apps, and services that “might be useful someday”. TiddlyWiki used to serve the same function, and it also became unwieldy, although less so than Bear because there’s no Shortcut to make a tiddler. You have to put in an ounce of effort. But no matter how hard or easy it is, there’s no reason to pollute otherwise useful notes and tiddlers with ephemeral URLs you’re never going to need again. Get that shit out of your working/thinking area and into a tool that’s better at storing and sharing it. Pick out the best stuff and point people to it only after it sticks with you.

November 8, 2024 bookmarks linkding

Bear isn’t great at Daily Notes, but org-journal is

I don’t want to bend Bear into being a Daily Notes repository. If I’m gonna do that, I may as well use Obsidian (don’t wanna go there, either). Plus, if the Bear developers had wanted us to do daily notes in it, they would have designed it for that. But org-journal is very good at collecting an arbitrarily large number of daily notes in sequence in one giant, immutable file. Or in my case, in one giant file per month. And with Drafts’s ability to understand org-mode, I can write right in today’s org-formatted note from anywhere and paste it into real org-journal when I get to the computer at night. I could do that with beorg and Dropbox sync, but as many times as I add to a day’s notes, I don’t want to rely on beorg to not mess up my files. And I don’t want to edit real org files when I’m only using the phone, so I’m cheating and using Drafts with its iCloud sync (not iCloud Drive) to do the work. Drafts is so ultra stable that it feels like a local/paper file on my phone anyway.

Now I just need to make an org-mode formatting keyboard row in Drafts.

October 26, 2024 Bear.app org-journal Drafts org-mode beorg

Weeknotes 6

  • Maybe I should just start calling these “Occasional Weekendnotes”.
  • We now have one or two foxes with mange who sleep on chairs or in the DIY cat shelter on our porch. Every night, Sarah puts a raw chicken wing out in a metal bowl for one of them to find and grab and eat. Our hope is they’ll get comfortable enough that we can get the wildlife rescue people to loan us a humane trap and they can retrieve and rehabilitate these little guys.
  • Last weekend I installed next to my desk a corner shelf that had been sitting around for a long time. Having a cassette deck, VHS VCR, Focusrite audio interface, and the fresh experience of seeing a sea of undifferentiated old audio and video tapes in the basement lit a fire under me to get back to logging and digitizing. I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
  • Today I used TiddlyWiki to update some notes about cataloguing audio recordings and it was immediately useful and shareable and required zero activation energy, unlike my beloved org-mode or this here blog. TiddlyWiki is probably a better place to collect and share “interesting links” because I don’t hoard them for 21 days at a time, and they’re easier to connect to other things. In fact, I just scrolled through all the random things I saved to Bear over the past three weeks and I don’t care enough about any of them now to list them here.
  • We saw the Tom Petty documentary Heartbreakers Beach Party this afternoon and it was excellent. Cameron Crowe knew what he was doing even when he was 25 or however old he was when they shot it. And it made me love Tom Petty even more. Music just flowed out of him.

Music:

Yep, this is way more than one week’s worth of music.

October 20, 2024 weeknotes music inertia archiving audio TiddlyWiki

What is it about people who write Weeknotes?

I follow the #weeknotes tag on Mastodon and find it very hard to not dive into every post tagged with that. If you write weeknotes, I feel like we’re already almost friends because of the format, the commitment, and the humility. Weeknoters are loggers, not always bloggers. I can get behind this! I collect, organize, archive (hoard?), and share for fun.

A weeknote is rarely the chance to say, “Here’s what I think about important issue X”. They’re typically more pleasantly mundane: a list of what you did this week, maybe what you did at work, things you saw and heard, and a list of interesting links you came across. Weeknotes put us all on an equal footing. Everyone just had a week. What you noticed and how you spent the time and energy is what makes yours different. If your interests are even remotely up my alley, I’m adding you to the groaning load of my RSS reader.

October 3, 2024 weeknotes