Recommendations for a journaling app?

[OldCorpse]

I'm running Sonoma on my new 15" MBA M2 and I'm trying to get some apps to make it usable.

One I really need is a journaling app, but trying to find one is very difficult, because so many are not transparent when it comes to pricing and features. Here are my requirements:

1)NO SUBSCRIPTION!!! I'm ok with a one-time payment, up to like $60 (if it' really good)
2)LOCALLY STORED - I don't want my entries/data stored online somewhere in the cloud etc. - I want it locally on my computer
3)Good search function - by text, date etc.
4)Strong calendar game - for example, I need to be able to make entries "in the past", by say 15 years, (basically I come from a journaling app that was abandoned and I need to transfer that data to the new journal app, going back to 2008)
5)Prefer no distractions, if possible - so I don't need any "quotes of the day, inspirational quotes etc", prompts for "mindfulness", "gratitude" etc., alerts going off, notifications popping up, random sounds, graphics, photos or colors popping up and so on - if the app is otherwise very good, I guess I can live with these distractions, but otherwise "less is more"

That's really it - anything extra is just gravy. I don't need any templates, schedulers, list keepers, planners or complicated features. My entries will be pretty much exclusively text (so I don't need to place any media files), really a template text created by myself that I alter daily from one day to the next, so it's not like I need pages and pages per day - a one page entry is usually all I need.

What's your recommendation? Thank you!

 

[ct2k7]

I wonder if Obsidian with the calendar plugin would work for you?

 

[OldCorpse]

Hmm. I looked up Obsidian and calendar plugins - seems a bit complicated to me, whereas I want as simple as humanly possible, no mind-maps necessary et. But then again, I have only glanced at Obsidian, maybe this would work if I set it up right - but for example, can I create a calendar that goes back to 2008 and populate it with searchable daily text data, and then if I need to find what was written f.ex. on May 3 2014 I can find it easily etc. Needs some investigatin'

 

[gwhizkids]

Hmm. I looked up Obsidian and calendar plugins - seems a bit complicated to me, whereas I want as simple as humanly possible, no mind-maps necessary et. But then again, I have only glanced at Obsidian, maybe this would work if I set it up right - but for example, can I create a calendar that goes back to 2008 and populate it with searchable daily text data, and then if I need to find what was written f.ex. on May 3 2014 I can find it easily etc. Needs some investigatin'

Obsidian can be simple if you want it to be. The complexity comes when you start with a lot of the plugins. But it has a built in Dsily Note feature which sounds like it would be exactly what you’re looking for.

 

[OldCorpse]

UPDATE - FWIW, I bought the Mémoires 5 as my journaling app. It was a one time $30 payment. I could've kept searching, but at some point you've got to get something, otherwise you'll search forever. Obviously, since I've only had it for a couple of days, I can't say that it's the best out there or that it won't have some flaws with more extensive use.

Among the reasons I bought it was that it was very simple, non-subscription, and a surprisingly hard feature to find - I can populate the calendar backward, i.e. I can make entries into the past, for example year 2018 etc. A shocking number of journaling apps don't have this capability - that's really idiotic if you think about it, because many people (I'm an example) have tons of entries from journalling apps that have been abandoned (in my case the excellent and much mourned Journler), and we want to bring our entries into the new app... sometimes I wonder who becomes a developer given how clueless many appear when it comes to feature selection.

In any case, we'll see if this is something that'll work - encouragingly, they say they've been around for 15 years and plan on hanging around... of course, nobody can possibly guarantee that, unless you're a huge corporation like microsoft (but not always, think of all the google abandonware). But if you've got one or two developers, there's no way you should expect longevity; releasing the code into and going opensource and allowing forks can help, but there's plenty of apps that died even with that.

One red flag - either the developer's website is not being updated, or something funky is going on: I downloaded and bought the app a couple of days ago, yet on the developer website it says: THIS IS VERSION 4. Meanwhile version 5 has been out for quite some time and this is what I have (About says 5.01(83)), so what exactly am I paying for? Either sloppy or weird, in any case a kind of red flag, but who knows.

If anything weird/good/interesting happens with this app, I might dig up this thread and update it.

 

[ignatius345]

Sounds like you're sorted, but I would throw out Agenda as another possible journalling choice for anyone perusing this thread. I think it ticks all the boxes you had, and the basic version is free. It has strong calendar integration and lets you backdate notes if you choose. The typography and aesthetics are OK, not incredible, but functional. It's quite actively developed. There's iCloud or Dropbox sync but that can be disabled so it's just local.

The business model they use is great. If you want premium features, you buy them with a one-time payment and you get every premium feature there is, to keep forever -- plus any new ones that come out for one year. At the end of the year you keep all the features you paid for. If down the road they add premium features you want, you can buy those as well. I wish more developers would do things this way.