A while back I started maintaining a journal, it can contain things that I’ve learned like new
programming techniques, new commands, new insights, …etc. The key for me to make this viable
is to be low-friction, so I’ve written an Emacs Lisp script that opens a journal in my journal
directory with today’s date as the filename, so whenever I want to write something, I just
hit Ctrl-x-j in emacs, write what i want and move on. And later on, if I want to check
something in my journal e.g. an obscure command, I can just grep my journal directory.
Here’s the elisp code that does that:
(defconst journal-path "~/personal/notes/journal/")
(defun get-today-filename ()
(concat journal-path (format-time-string "%d-%m-%Y") ".org"))
(defun today-journal ()
"Open today's journal."
(interactive)
(let ((fname (get-today-filename)))
(find-file fname)))
(keymap-global-set "C-x j" 'today-journal)