In the process of diddling around with a bunch of different kinds of logs and formats, I realized I had two things that did the same thing, more or less, for org files and Markdown files. The org version bothered me because I went down the wrong track and ended up using org-agenda-files with a given filetag to populate the list of potential targets and get out of some stuff I couldn’t get right. The Markdown version was better, but didn’t have a non-fiddle-with-your-config-file way to get new files added.

So log2file takes both of them and adds a few functions + Custom settings to add and remove files from your list of targets: No fiddling with your org agendas, no editing your config file if you decide to add a file as a target, and it speaks both Markdown and org, picking a log heading format based on the file extension, and enforcing the presence of either a first-line l1 heading or org #+TITLE: line based on the filename if it doesn’t find one.

I don’t think I’ll do much more with it. The point of embarkation on all this, as I sort of failed to come back around and make clear yesterday, was that I have a simple set of requirements:

  • Keep it in plain text
  • Favor a logging/journaling approach
  • Avoid anything that feels fragile or complex

On that last point, almost everything these days feels fragile, where “fragile” is a function of:

  • Depending on rigid formatting conventions (filename, metadata, inline syntax of any complexity)
  • Depending on a specific app to interact with the data

… and from those requirements I didn’t feel like much of anything these days works for me. My grandmother once got very, very angry with my father for splurging on a $10 Christmas tree when we went home for the holidays, because she was a dirt-farming Depression survivor and frugality had been etched into her bones. I’ve just had seemingly simple shit break on me in a way that is stupidly and frustratingly disruptive when you suddenly realize the underlying complexity of the tools supporting the workflow is going to make it hard to just pick up with a text editor and no supporting automation.

So where I started with this was just a collection of yasnippet and Espanso snippets that aped the Journelly log format:

  • Open a log file
  • Trigger the snippet
  • Enter the text
  • Save/exit

But I was really inspired by org-capture, which wrings out a ton of the friction in routing text to a sensible endpoint. The problems with org-capture were:

  1. org-mode dependent
  2. Complex, in that it was beyond my skill to populate a custom list of targets, and I hated the idea of manually keeping a target list in a capture template.
  3. org always beguiles me into more and more complexity and “just one more thing”

So this is a way to get some speed back into the interaction … no finding/opening/snippeting … but in a way that doesn’t leave me dependent on a bunch of fragile stuff.