Appealing journaling apps for desktop

January 8, 2025 5:41 AM

For the past year or so, I've been trying to keep a journal for capturing memories and working through feelings and thoughts for mental health. I'm expecting to be journaling a lot more intensely soon while trying a new therapy, and my journal is... clonky. It's just a LibreOffice file where I copy and write over my prompts every time I want to do a new entry. I'd like to improve on this!

I'd like a journaling app that offers quality of life features like "knowing what day it is" and generating a new place to put an entry each day, and easy navigation through past entries (like a calendar select or similar). Possibly other things that would make it inviting or helpful to use like a nice UI or stickers or a mood tracker or something. I would prefer to write/use my own prompts rather than go through a bunch of pre-generated ones but would be open to one with its own prompts in case they were close to the intent/quantity of my own.

But most importantly... I don't want to do any of this on my phone! This is a sit-at-real-computer activity for me. (I know a real-world journal might be even better for this, but I'm not interested in that either right now)

tl;dr, do any of you have a journaling app you love, that doesn't live in your phone?

posted by space snail to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

This isn't an app but a Google doc for a five year journal.

I came to journaling via therapy. I got a divorce in 2019 and had a really tough go of it. One of the specific problems I had articulating was how unmoored--in time, in place, in life--the experience left me feeling. That feeling hasn't gone away, per se. Rather, it's become something I think of as having "woken up to" in an existential way. It's become more important to me to moor myself to a sense of cycle, change, renewal, flexibility, resilience, and other words that live in a longer view. My memory is fallible, so taking a longer view needed some help.

I started writing in a 5-year paper journal that has a space for each of the five years for each calendar date. Two things are most notable.

First, each year's entry for a date is short, only 4-5 sentences. This is a protection against wheedling, florid, overwrought navel-gazing. In a short space, I get the sense that, heck yeah, I can and should be able to fill this little space with the uniqueness of any given day. It's also a protection against feeling like a failure for not journaling effusively. Nope, just a couple of words are needed when the greater point is the perspective afforded by a routine that circles back on itself in a regular but extended way.

Second, it's a real challenge of a thing. What *does* life look like lived aware of five years' worth of it? This is a response to the forgetfulness of most journaling. There's a place for it, of course, but how often is a journal entry more than something to be almost passionately or intensely felt for a moment and then left behind as if in a vault? It can be... painful to revisit that level of detail, so I rarely do it when I'm paging through longer-form journals. Instead, I've watched as these five years have passed with me aware, every day, of what I was doing one, two, three, four years ago. It is wild. My internal memory of life today is sometimes starkly different from what I chose to record on a given day in the past. That's proven to be a helpful perspective. That's why, after filling up the original 5-year paper journal, I've started working from a version of this online one. It's got a bit more wiggle room and flexibility than the physical version and I'm looking forward to seeing how that changes the experience. Here's to the next five years!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 6:21 AM on January 8 [2 favorites]

Are you looking for a downloadable program or is an online-based journal OK?

If online is OK, I liked Penzu when I was using it (I decided I preferred writing a paper journal). You can lock your journal so only you can read it. The free version is pretty basic but does enough. A paid account is only $20 a year.
posted by edencosmic at 7:16 AM on January 8

Response by poster: I think online/browser-based is okay as long as there's some assurance it's not public, but I do have a slight preference for a desktop program that can be separate from my browser and its sea of tabs.
posted by space snail at 7:33 AM on January 8

I think if you state what computer platform you use (Windows? Mac? Linux?) you will get better answers.
posted by jabah at 7:35 AM on January 8

Response by poster: Sorry, I'm a Windows user and apparently not computer savvy enough to remember there were other possibilities. Thanks for the tip!
posted by space snail at 7:40 AM on January 8

I have used Day One since 2000 and am very happy with it. It has a calendar view, and an "on this day" feature. It's about $40/year for the premium version, which a person would want.
posted by Well I never at 8:09 AM on January 8 [2 favorites]

LibreOffice could do a great deal of this with a few macros — it can know what date it is! — which keeps it free and local. If you think that could be pretty enough, I’d be happy to kibitz on writing the actual macros. It might count as a Metafilter Project.
posted by clew at 8:28 AM on January 8

I've been using Journey for a while (paid version; mostly use the phone app and haven't tried the downloadable desktop app). I won't argue that it's optimal for you but it's worth checking out. I wanted to be able to record audio entries and to tag entries, and it's great for that.
posted by aincandenza at 8:56 AM on January 8

I’ve started using OneNote for documenting stuff. It isn’t too fancy, you just set groups like “books - learning” and “books - fun” and then I have a tab for each book and sub pages for whatever I’d like. It can probably do more than I’ve recently been using it for, but it does tie you into the Office ecosystem.

For journaling, you’d just have a group for the year or whatever. The program is just a glorified notetaking system.

Interested to look at some others mentioned above. I want to document the things I play, read, watch, learn this year better than my 5+ notebooks.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 10:38 AM on January 8

You could use Obsidian and create a template for your prompts and automatically inserting the date. A bit fiddly at first to set it up, but free, local storage, easily searchable, you can link entries, etc.
posted by meijusa at 11:27 AM on January 8

I'm a big fan of DayOne. I've been using it for years.
posted by quiet wanderer at 2:24 PM on January 8 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you for the suggestions! So far Journey seems to be working the best for me since it has that extra mood tracking feature and seems like I can set my own prompt template if I opt for the paid version. I also liked @late afternoon dreaming hotel's insights about the value of looking at how you were doing on the same date in previous years, which I may try to do once I have a year's worth of entries even if I'm not using the year-over-year template.

@aincandenza, I'm curious about how you've used the tagging features. I've never had that capability, so I never thought about how to use it. What sort of tags do you find useful in journaling?
posted by space snail at 4:31 PM on January 8

I used iDailyDiary for years and it worked well. I used the paid version, but they have a free one as well.

Here are two more options I've come across:

• The Journal by DavidRM software
• Diarium

posted by jaden at 7:16 PM on January 8

Another vote for DavideRM's The Journal.
posted by yclipse at 12:55 PM on January 9