I’m having a great time using Journelly. It’s an org-mode based journaling tool built for iOS, which ticks some big nerd boxes for me. Journelly stamps metadata into the header of each entry, like weather and location, and then the app nicely renders that info on display in the app. And creating new entries is as frictionless as making a new note in Drafts or another editor – but with the bonus of living in a tidy, appealing timeline that Álvaro Ramírez calls “tweeting, but for your eyes only.” (By comparison, most of my time-and-place notes that I put in Drafts never make it out of the inbox, not since my long-ago slow blog over at my tilde.) Since Journelly’s data is stored in org-mode, it’s interoperable with emacs (see nice write-ups and usage notes by Mike, Jack, and Ellane¹. Journelly’s developer also runs the new blog platform lmno and builds some other cool org-based tools.

Using the iPhone-based Journal app in recent iOS versions hasn’t stuck for me, despite being well-built and elegant, and of course it’s tightly integrated with the operating system. But I think I’m somewhat deterred by the fact that it only lives on the phone. I’m attracted to Journelly in part because it overcomes this limitation. I’m not doing it yet, but it’s easy to point the iOS app’s storage to an iCloud location and access it from anywhere you can run emacs, which opens up new ways to write and edit posts, but also to eventually publish or convert into a book or archive via Pandoc — so many possibilities.

Instant writing, with a powerful engine under the hood for a ton of flexibility, make Journelly a very neat little tool, one I’m happy to continue adventuring with.