vscode-journal README

Lightweight Extension for Visual Studio Code to take track of your daily notes.

What's this about?

This extension is only useful for people like me, who use simple text files for notes, task lists, and everything else which has to be remembered and searched for. Textfiles are easy to backup, sync and can be opened anywhere by everything. This extension has the following functions:

Open or create a journal page for a specific day (with shortcuts for today and tomorrow )
Add detailed notes for today
Add a memo to today's journal page (one liner e.g. for tasks)

Features

Press 'F1' or Ctrl+Shift+P to access one of the commands. The notes are stored in a folder on your pc using the following structure (taking ZIM Desktop wiki as inspiration: year/month/day.md, the notes files for October 22th would be ../2016/10/22.md. Detailed notes (e.g. meeting notes) are placed in the subfolder ../2016/10/22/some-meeting-notes.md.

Commands

Journal Pages

journal:day (keybindings: ctrl+shift+j or cmd+shift+j on mac) opens a dialog to enter one of the following:

offset: 0 is today, -1 yesterday, +1 tomorrow, +4 in four days, ...
day of week: next wednesday for journal page of next wednesday, last wednesday for previous. Supported values are monday, mon, tuesday, tue, wednesday, wed, thursday, thu, friday, fri, saturday, sat, sunday, sun
date: 10-25 for Oct 25, 25 for 25th of current month, 2015-25-10 for Oct 25 in 2015. Implausible values will be catched (e.g. 32 for day), simple errors (e.g. 11-31) will open the next possible day (in this case 12-01)
shortcuts are: today, tod, tomorrow, tom, yesterday, yes;

You can use the following modifiers when entering a value

flags: like todo or task will add a bulletpoint. Example: task today do this
day: see description of the command journal:day. Example: next wednesday remember the milk

Any remaining text will be added as memo (or task) to the specified day (or today as default).

Other Examples:

11-24 task do something adds a task for page of Nov 24th
+1 I have to remember this adds a memo to tomorrow's page
0 opens today's page

journal:today is a shortcut for journal:day with the offset 0

journal:tomorrow is also a shortcut to open tomorrow's journal page.

Notes & Memos

journal:note opens a dialog to enter the title of the new page. The title is also the filename (stored as subfolder in the journal structure, e.g. folder ´25´ in folder ´10´). The command supports offset definitions as prefix (see below).

journal:memo (deprecated) opens the same dialog as journal:day

Open the journal

journal:open starts a new instance of vscode with the base directory of your journal as root

Settings

You have to set the base folder for notes folder structure before you start. Open your settings, search for 'journal' and copy the journal.base line into your personal settings. Adjust the value, for example: "journal.base": "C:/Users/FooBar/Documents/Journal" (use forward slash!)

The default file format is Markdown (using md as extension), which is natively supported by Visual Studio Code. I use Asciidoc for my notes (with .adoc as extension), in this case you should also install an Asciidoc Syntax extension.

kaiwood / vscode-journal