A built-in diary

Since I’m mentioning small, built-in bonuses to some established programs, I have another I can point out.

A few months ago I wrote about Ben Winston‘s tiny journal tool, aptly called jn.

I discovered the other day that Vimwiki has a built-in function that’s not far off from that.

Entering \w\w from vim’s control mode drops you straightaway to a diary page prenamed for today’s date.

Diary entries are kept in a subfolder inside your wiki data folder, and have their own index page, which looks sort of like this.

= Diary =
| [[2011-04-11]] | [[2011-04-10]] | [[2011-04-09]] | [[2011-04-08]] |

The table grows from left to right, meaning your newest entry is always on the left. Rather convenient, really. šŸ˜‰

11 thoughts on “A built-in diary

  1. Ben Winston

    very nice! i have vimwiki installed, but haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet (or maybe haven’t found a good use…i can’t decide) to think this functionality was there the whole time! šŸ™‚

    Reply
  2. aperson

    I just have a script that opens up nano for the days entry, than when I close that, it adds that to the single diary file (with proper dates and formatting).

    Reply
  3. Luca

    Nice! Do you have solutions for automatically syncing the wiki up between different machines?

    Reply
    1. Ben Winston

      Best way I can think of: Dropbox. I have all my dot-files symlinked on machines pointing to a version on Dropbox, so they’re always up to date and the same on every machine!

      Reply
      1. Chubby Checker

        Do you use the same versions of applications across all the systems/distributions/users you use that for?

        I can’t see me doing what you said above because of trying to keep my systems clean. Like I’d never dual boot using the same /home partition or something of that kind…

        Reply
        1. Ben Winston

          well, no, good point :). however, this still works well for something like bashrc or vimrc, so you can have the same aliases and vim environment on each computer.

          Reply
  4. Chubby Checker

    Sure. using dotfiles.org or e.g. a github repository is pretty common for manually managed rc files…

    Reply
    1. Ben Winston

      agreed. i use github as well for my dotfiles, almost exclusively for the commit messages (and to share it with the large number of users). i had never heard of dotfiles.org, thanks for the link!

      Reply

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