org-journal VS notes

I use org-mode with org-journal https://github.com/bastibe/org-journal

What's nice about this workflow is when I create TODO items and don't finish them for a day it transfers over to the next day.

Sounds like org-mode is what you need, particularly clocking like was mentioned in another comment. However your workflow requires lots of customization. Ultimately you need to take a deeper dive into org-mode and what it can do(and how), along with org-clock-convenience with maybe org-journal. Your starting point should always be agenda, not the .org file itself.

As mentioned elsewhere, I too do a mix (happy to talk fountain pens and paper if you’d like). But for digital, Emacs is the supreme solution. It has tools like Org-roam for Zettlekasten-style notes, Org-journal for a developers journal, Org-babel for literate (or Jupyter-style) explorations. Nothing else comes close. Oh, and the “E” stands for extensible, so if it doesn’t do what you need, you can make it yourself.

For the second question, 1. try package like org-reverse-datetree and org-journal which can custom data format and level. 2. use file+function in capture template to find the right location in the file. 3. make the function in 2 respect you extend-day-until.

org-journal seems to fit your description pretty well. I have been using it for years.

- type my timestamped notes

I can do this from any buffer in Emacs, so it's really convenient to stop in the middle of something, jot down a note, and then go right back to what I was doing. I develop iOS/macOS software right now, so the switch to Emacs from Xcode is a little more friction than I used to have, but it's so useful I don't mind it at all.

I have a weekly journal in a directory for the year, titled week number-month-day that started that week (this week's is `34_08-23`)

[0]https://github.com/bastibe/org-journal

bastibe/org-journal is already a feature full extension to Org for keeping a journal. And actively maintained by Bastian and Christian.

I'm interested in using org-journal, a minor mode for Emacs org-mode, which supports collapsing. https://github.com/bastibe/org-journal

    * Tuesday, 06/04/13

I've been doing something similar for ~20 years at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

    - Running `notes` will open this month's notes for YYYY_MM.txt

I use a very command line focused approach with https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

Since about 2001 I used YYYY-MM.txt plain text files and have a shell script to help create notes in the most friendly way I could think of from the command line at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

Totally works fine for a knowledge log when you're streaming high level details. I still use it today.

But when you want to really go all-in with in-depth notes it's tricky because in 1 month's time if you're hardcore deep in the woods of learning, applying and using something you're going to end up with hundreds of concepts from an assorted set of tools and it kind of stinks to have all of that info sitting in 1 file. Think about using something like Kubernetes. That's really Kubernetes, Kustomize / Helm, EKS, various cloud hosting details (networking, etc.), Terraform and ton of super useful commands / context. Details you for sure want recorded for later.

For this type of info I've been building up a knowledge base with https://obsidian.md/. It's really nice and I highly recommend it. It's been working well for keeping things reasonably categorized without wasting a lot of time on the details around keeping links and tags up to date. It also has Vim mode that's good enough where day to day writing feels natural.

Did you end up automating the entries?

For example, I have a command line note taking script at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

It creates a YYYY-MM-DD.txt file and doesn't include time stamps but it would be a 1 line change to make each entry get timestamped. I didn't do that because personally I'm more interested in monthly notes not per minute.

But I do think removing the barrier of creating entries is an important step with jotting things down, this way you can focus on what you want to write and not the boilerplate.

A whole bunch of little things, mainly command line tools.

Most of them are open source and also have extensive documentation and a screencast video going over them.

In no specific order:

- https://github.com/nickjj/notes

- https://github.com/nickjj/invoice

- https://github.com/nickjj/wait-until

And a few recent little scripts to solve specific things:

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-ffmpeg-to-get-an-mp3s-d...

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-shell-script-to-keep-a-bunc...

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/bash-aliases-to-prepare-recor...

Along similar lines, nickjj also has a similar (but bash) notes script at:

https://github.com/nickjj/notes

While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/

It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too.

Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid.

[0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes