A simple journaling app with a message-app-like interface, tags for entries, and local persistence. Built with Vite, React, and ShadcnUI.
Try it out here.
For some reason, a message app interface creates less of a psychological hurdle to journaling than a Markdown file for me. I also like to have timestamps for my entries to log throughout the day and see how my day's been going.
I've been using Telegram for journaling, but I'm missing the ability to write my entries in one place, tag them, and then see entries for each tag separately. That's why I created ZenJournal.
- Tags get extracted from input text and attached to the entry
- Persistence to localStorage
- Editing and deleting entries
- Suggestions dropdown with existing tags after typing
# - Renaming and deleting tags
- Back-up export and import
- Keyboard navigation
- Support mobile browsers
When I travel between timezones (which is not rare), I want to see past entries written on the day and at the time they were written in the original timezone, not in the current timezone—but also preserve the timezone information in the data so that I can recover the exact time instant of the entry. I also want to group entries based on their date (in the original timezone). The ZonedDateTime, PlainTime, and PlainDate classes from the Temporal proposal make this incredibly easy compared to the Date class.
I use superjson to be able to persist Temporal instances, which I would've had to do for Date anyway.
When in doubt, I copied behavior from Telegram, e.g. saving and restoring existing drafts when you edit a message, whitespace treatment, displaying the current text of the edited message, etc.