Adding a Journal Entry Using Org-Mode

Last week I decided to begin keeping a journal to record my programming notes and code snippets.  Since I’m a dedicated emacs user I wanted to be able to maintain the journal without leaving emacs.

Some quick research led me to Org-mode.  From the Org-mode homepage:

Org-mode is a mode for keeping notes, maintaining ToDo lists, and doing project planning with a fast and effective plain-text system.

Clearly it is a powerful system, and has lots of features beyond those I need for a simple journal.  However I was easily able to set it up to do what I need — namely, prepend date-stamped entries to a single file.

To make entering new journal entries as simple as possible I wrote the following function:

(setq journal-file "~/journal.org")

(defun start-journal-entry ()
  "Start a new journal entry."
  (interactive)
  (find-file journal-file)
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (org-insert-heading)
  (org-insert-time-stamp (current-time) t)
  (open-line 2)
  (insert " "))

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c j") 'start-journal-entry)

It opens the journal file, creates a new date-stamped entry at the top, and then positions the cursor ready for me to type the body.

So now I can easily start a new journal entry at any time by hitting C-c j.

Update: Dmitri Minaev pointed out that this can be more easily achieved by taking advantage of org-mode’s integration with remember-mode. Hence, I’ve replaced the above code with

(org-remember-insinuate)
(setq org-remember-templates
      '(("Journal"
         ?j
         "* %U %? %^g\n\n   %x"
         "~/Archive/journal.org"
         'top)))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c j") 'org-remember)

The only thing I don’t like about this method is that trailing newlines are removed from the entry when it’s saved to the journal file. I prefer to separate journal entries by two blank lines. A quick check of the manual and the org-mode code didn’t uncover a way to turn off this behaviour.

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