Thursday, 3 September
Write the day,
then
close
it.
Free on one device. No account, no sign-up, nothing to agree to.
What went well today, and why?
Cleared the desk before starting. It helped more than it should have.
start the day
Market at seven. Back before the street woke up.
Reread a page from March. I had forgotten writing it.
Quiet one. Nothing worth keeping, kept anyway.
Write before this hour and it goes under yesterday.
After this, a day can be read but not rewritten.
On Lifetime, one file in your own Drive, Daybook/daybook.json, with no server in between.
The day, already open
It opens on today
Most journal apps make writing feel like homework. Daybook opens on today with the cursor already blinking. No menu to cross, no title to invent, and no blank canvas asking what you would like to make.
The day is the title
The cursor is already in today's page. Nothing to name, no folder to pick, no New Entry button to press.
One day, one page
Write at nine in the morning and again at eleven at night. Both sittings land on the same dated page, each stamped with its own time.
Your day ends when you say
Still typing at one in the morning? That belongs to yesterday, and Daybook files it there. You pick the hour the day turns over, anywhere from midnight to six.
The day closes
After the window you choose, a day can be read but not rewritten. What you add much later tends to be shaped by how things turned out.
No streaks, no reminders, no badges
Nothing counts the days you missed. Nothing arrives in the evening asking you to reflect. Miss a month and nothing is broken.
It writes with no signal
Install it to your home screen and it writes on a plane, in a tunnel, off the grid entirely. Nothing it needs is on a network.
Where it lives
Your journal is one plain file
Your whole journal is one file, daybook.json. On Daybook Local it stays on the device you wrote it on. Add Daybook Lifetime and the same file lives in your own Google Drive. We do not have a server. We do not have your password. We cannot read a word of it.
You can open that file in any text editor. Export the whole archive to this device whenever you like, and import only ever adds days back, so it does not overwrite anything newer. If Daybook disappeared tomorrow, your history would still be sitting in your own storage.
There when you want it
A prompt, if you ask for one
Press / on a blank page or on any empty line, or Ctrl K anywhere at all. Nothing suggests itself while you are mid-sentence, and you can turn prompts off for good.
start the day
Long call with Mum about the garden. She has decided the fig tree stays.
Finished the blue notebook. Two years, and the last page was a shopping list.
Slept badly, worked well. Not sure those two are unrelated.
All of it, in one column
Every day you wrote, newest first
The Timeline is the whole journal in one column, with search across every word of it. On This Day brings back the same date from the years before. No calendar grid to fill in, no heat map keeping score.
Paper is the palette Daybook ships with, and there are three others. You can flatten the page or turn the background wash off, and your writing stays the same plain, readable size whichever you pick.
Bought once, not rented
Two ways to keep it
The whole app, on one device.
- Every day you want to write, with no limit
- Timeline, search and On This Day
- Prompts, four palettes and a plainer surface
- Export and import your whole archive by hand
- Writes with no signal, installs to your home screen
- Sync across your devices
- Backup to your Drive
The same journal, on every device you own.
- Everything in Local
- Google Drive sync across phone, tablet and laptop, each sitting labelled with the device it came from
- Automatic backup to your own Drive account
- One payment, kept for life
- Still no account, still no server, still no subscription
- Your file stays readable in any text editor
Today is already open.
No account neededOpen today's pageFree on one device, forever. Already writing somewhere else? Bring your journal here.