I saw the Irreal post about Journelly, but mostly ignored it because I wasn’t looking for a new iOS journaling app. He did mention that Journelly is by Álvaro Ramírez, author of Plain Org, lmno.lol, and others, so that made things more interesting.

What intrigued me most, though, was learning that Journelly is backed by plain-text Org Mode files. Bonus! Now it had my attention.

Álvaro was kind enough to let me into the TestFlight, and I’m putting it through its paces this morning.

Here’s what mine looks like so far…

Simple and easy to use, so that’s good. As Álvaro desribed Journelly, it’s like a personal, private Twitter/Instagram/Mastodon account.

Speaking of simple, the entire journal is kept as a single journelly.org file. I chose to sync mine via iCloud, which meant that I could view and edit it locally on my Mac. The problem with iCloud Drive’s default storage locations is that they’re in a stupid place, e.g. /Users/jbaty/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~com~xenodium~Journelly/Documents/Journelly.org. Don’t make me create symlinks, iCloud! 😄

Digging into the settings, I noticed that in addition to the default iCloud Drive folder, I could configure Journelly to use any folder in iCloud, including my ever-popular ~/Documents/Notes folder. Much better.

Since I use Emacs for most everything, including my journals, I’ve never done much journaling on my Phone. Journelly could change this equation.

It would be cool if I could use Journelly from my Mac as well. To that end, I created an Org Mode capture template to make it easy to add entries while in Emacs on my Mac.

("j" "Journelly Entry" entry
           (file "~/Documents/Notes/Journelly/Journelly.org")
           "* %U @ -\n%?" :prepend t)

I can now hit C-c c j and I’m in a capture buffer for the Journelly file. The Journelly app can include weather and location to new entries. Currently, my capture template isn’t smart enough to do that, but it could be, with just a bit of work.

It’s only been a couple of hours with Journelly, so this isn’t meant to be a review, but first impressions are that it’s handy, simple, and could work well as an adjunct to my existing Org mode based note-taking setup.

For a recent review of Journelly, see Monday App Finder: Journelly, a Twitter-Like Journal for iOS - The Mac Observer.