I picked day one up as a journaling app many years ago, and have enjoyed it. But I’ve now mostly left the apple ecosystem and I’m ready for a new solution. An important feature to me is the calendar view that both shows you what days you have entries for and allows you to see previous year’s entries on a day. The lack of this feature knocks out the most recommended alternatives on this community (joplin, obsidian, and logseq come to mind). Journey cloud and diarium are strong picks, but I’d prefer non proprietary and stronger self hosting support. Along with better platform availability. Memoria is also in consideration, but the documentation is pretty light and it’s hard to tell if it will function in the way I expect. Likewise with memos, which I’ve seen suggested on here.
Needs:
- Usable on linux (I can live with a web app)
- Calendar view showing days with entries
- Encryption
- Cloud sync functionality (no local only apps like rednotebook)
Nice to haves:
- Proper app for linux, android, ios
- Ability to import a day one backup, preserving my 5 or so years of journal history
- FOSS
- Selfhostable
- Support for media (primarily photos)
- Prompts for password on every launch
- Equivalent to “on this day” feature allowing you to view previous entries on a day
If I suggested helix + dvalv on your desktop, Markor + Valv on your phone, and SyncThing for syncing… would that be sufficient? It’s basically what I use, but without the dvalv/Valv component because my notes are never hosted outside of my phone or desktop, so I don’t need the encryption.
The missing piece would be a “calendar view”; I’d have to think about that one. Myself, my entries are named by ISO 8601, so sorting by timestamp or name both work. But if you want a traditional grid calendar with, like, colored days for the days with entries, that’d require another program.
It sounds to be, though, that you’ve set up your requirements such that you really just want a web app, with client-side encryption. I’m old enough to have learned the value of application-independent data storage; SQLite is about a complex as I’m comfortably with, and flat files in a directory are even better.