Text File Format

Gthnk uses a basic text file format because anything more complicated isn’t reliable enough for something as important as your thoughts. Even though journal entries are stored in a sqlite3 database for fast indexing, they are also exported as plain text files every night.

Text Formatting

There are a few simple rules that serve to partition a text file into a sequence of journal entries.

Timestamp and Datestamp

An entry is denoted by a timestamp, which is written using hours and minutes, like 0815 for 8:15am and 1425 for 2:25pm. This must have a blank line before it and a blank line after it.

A day is denoted by a datestamp, which is written using year-month-day, like 2016-01-08 for January 8, 2016. This must have a blank line before it and a blank line after it.

Markdown

Any journal entry may contain Markdown. This makes it easy to add lists and URLs. You don’t have to do anything special to enable Markdown.

Custom Markdown Extension

To support rendering Gthnk journals in a more aesthetically pleasing way, mdx_journal was written to provide a minor extension to basic markdown. This extension will cause datestamps to become large headings and timestamps to become slightly smaller headings. It makes a day’s entries much more readable.

Filesystem Exports

One of the goals for using text files is to ensure the journal has a higher likelihood of being readable to future generations. One thing we’ve learned is that file formats can become obsolete in a matter of years. However, ASCII text has been with us since 1960, so let’s stick with what works.