For journal keepers
A private place
for daily reflection.
Keeping a journal is a practice of slowing down.
Minimal Writer includes a private journal encrypted on your device before anything is synced.
Keeping a journal is a practice of slowing down — somewhere to think a thought all the way through, to notice the passing of a year, to write down the small things that would otherwise go unrecorded. It is one of the few kinds of writing with no audience at all.
Which is why most note-taking apps are the wrong room for it. They treat an entry like a task, surround it with settings and streaks and reminders, and turn a private habit into something that reports on you. The reflection goes out of it long before the writing does.
A year you can hold in one hand
Instead of a folder filling with dated files, a journal here is one document per year. The calendar beside it lays that year out at a glance: a past date opens the entry written on it, today opens a clean page with the date already on it, and the day you skipped is simply a day with nothing under it rather than a broken streak.
When something needs more room than a day — a trip, a long argument with yourself, a project you keep returning to — it can live as its own document nested under the entry that started it, without disturbing the calendar you write in every morning.
A journal is only worth keeping if it is honest, and honesty needs a room nobody else can walk into.
Private in the way that matters
A journal is only worth keeping if it is honest, and honesty needs a room nobody else can walk into. Lock yours and it is encrypted on your own device, before anything is sent anywhere; opening it again asks your fingerprint or your face, not a password stored on a server. What reaches us is text we cannot read, which is the only version of privacy worth promising.
And it stays yours in the ordinary sense too: years of entries can be exported as plain text whenever you want them, in a format that will still open long after any particular app has stopped existing. The encryption and the rest of the journal are described in full elsewhere.
Cultivate a quiet space for your thoughts.
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