Journal

A journal that stays on your machine

Most journalling apps ask you to trust a company with the most personal writing you do. This one does not have anywhere to put it. Everything you type is stored in your own browser, in IndexedDB, and the page that renders it is a static file. There is no account to create, no server that receives your entries, and no analytics of any kind on this site.

The tool opens on today with the cursor ready. Write as much or as little as you like — there is no minimum, no prompt to answer, and no scoring. Your work is saved automatically about half a second after you stop typing, so there is no save button to forget.

One entry per day

A journal is organised by date rather than by title, and this tool takes that literally: the date is the entry's identity. There is exactly one entry per calendar day, so you never have to name anything, decide where it belongs, or hunt for the note you started this morning. Coming back to a day you have already written simply reopens it for editing.

The calendar on the left marks every day you have written with a dot, which makes the shape of a habit visible at a glance — the weeks you kept going and the ones you did not. A streak counter sits below it, counting the consecutive days behind you. It is deliberately forgiving about the current day: your streak is not reported as broken merely because you have not written yet this evening. Only a missed yesterday ends it.

Dates are worked out from your device's local calendar, not from UTC. That distinction matters more for a daily journal than it might sound: several time zones spend their whole evening on the following day in UTC, and a tool that gets it wrong would offer you tomorrow's blank page at nine at night.

Finding things again

The search box filters your entries by their text, matching anywhere inside a word, so searching for part of a name or a place will find it. Results are listed newest first with the date and the opening line, and clicking one jumps both the editor and the calendar to that day. Clearing the box brings the full list back.

Because the search runs entirely against the copy in your browser, it works with no network connection at all — as does the rest of the tool. The whole site is installable as a progressive web app, so a journal you keep on a laptop on a train behaves exactly the same as one you keep at a desk.

Your writing, in a format you can take with you

Export all as Markdown downloads every entry you have written as a single .md file, oldest first, with each day under its own heading. Markdown is plain text, so the file opens in any editor, imports into Obsidian, Notion, Word or Google Docs, and will still be readable in decades when whatever tool you use next has come and gone.

This matters because data you cannot get out is data you do not really own. Take an export whenever you like; nothing about it phones home, and the file never leaves your machine unless you move it yourself.

Optional sync, to your Drive rather than ours

If you sign in with Google, your journal syncs through your own Google Drive so the same entries are available on your phone and your laptop. The file is written to Drive's hidden application data folder, which is private to this app within your account. It is your storage and your account — this site never holds a copy, and signing out stops the sync without touching what is already on your devices.

Two devices are reconciled entry by entry rather than by overwriting one side with the other. If you write Tuesday on your phone and Wednesday on your laptop, a sync leaves you with both. When the same day was edited in two places, the more recent edit is the one that survives.

Deleting an entry removes its text immediately and records that the day was deleted, so the deletion reaches your other devices instead of the entry reappearing the next time they sync.

What this tool is not

It is not encrypted end to end. Your entries are protected by your browser profile and, if you enable sync, by your Google account — which is the same protection your email has, and is meaningful, but it is not the same as a passphrase only you know. Anyone with access to your unlocked computer can read your journal, and clearing your browser's site data will delete entries that have not been synced or exported.

It is also not a note-taking app. There are no titles, folders, tags or backlinks, because a journal does not need them — the date does that job. If you want free-form notes you can name and organise, that is a different shape of tool.