Keeping a journal, even irregularly, can have many benefits. It's not only therapeutic and cathartic, it's also a good record of where you are and where you've been. It can help show your progress in life and remind you of what you've done right and what you've done wrong.
No matter what your reasons are for keeping a journal or a diary, there are a variety of ways in which to do that. You could go old school and use pen and paper. You could use a web-based application. Or you could turn to the humble text file[1].
Another option is to use a dedicated journaling application. There are several very flexible and very useful journaling tools for the Linux desktop. Let's take a look at three of them.
RedNotebook
Of the three journaling applications described here, RedNotebook[2] is the most flexible. Much of that flexibility comes from its templates. Those templates let you record personal thoughts or meeting minutes, plan a journey, or log a phone call. You can also edit existing templates or create your own.
You format your journal entries using markup that's very much like Markdown. You can also add tags to your journal entries to make them easier to find. Just click or type a tag in the left pane of the application, and a list of corresponding journal entries appears in the right pane.
On top of that, you can export all or some or just one of your journal entries to plain text, HTML, LaTeX, or PDF. Before you do that, you can get an idea of how an entry will look as a PDF or HTML file by clicking the Preview button on the