I pushed a couple updates to Journal, my command line journaling tool today.

As a reminder, you can add a natural language argument to your journal command which will set the date of the entry, e.g. journal mood "yesterday 8pm". This allows you to create entries in post with historical data you might have missed. One thing that it didn’t do well, though, is to get the correct weather for any weather type questions in the journal when using past dates. This latest update is able to get historical weather data and insert it correctly in the entry. No changes required for the user, just enter a past date and Journal will figure it out.

Second, I’ve noticed my mood and sleep shifts with the moon phase. I’m not into astrology or anything, but that seemed like useful data to track and start to draw better conclusions from. So now a question type of weather.forecast will include the moon phase as a moon_phase key, and you can use weather.moon to get just the moon phase for its own entry. The forecast in Markdown will also now include the moon phase.

That’s it, just tying up some loose ends. Journal is working pretty well for me to collect data and provide my therapist with detailed mood/behavior information. Let me know if there’s anything it doesn’t do that might help you out!

The latest version can be installed with gem install journal-cli. Visit the Journal project page for more info.