org-journal-tags

• Installation
• Usage
  • Adding tags
  • Database
  • Status buffer
  • Querying

A package to make sense of my life org-journal records.

The package adds the org-journal: link type to Org Mode. When placed in an org-journal file, it serves as a "tag" that references one or many paragraphs in the section or the entire section. These tags are aggregated in the database that can be queried in various ways.

Installation

As the package isn’t yet available anywhere but in this repository, you can clone the repository, add it to the load-path and require the package. My preferred way is use use-package with straight:

(use-package org-journal-tags
  :straight (:host github :repo "SqrtMinusOne/org-journal-tags")
  :after (org-journal)
  :config
  (org-journal-tags-autosync-mode))

Usage

Adding tags

To add an inline tag, you can manually create a link of the following format:

[[org-journal:<tag-name>][<tag-description>]]

Or run M-x org-journal-tags-insert-tag to insert a tag with a completion interface. The description is not aggregated and thus optional.

The link will reference the current Org Mode paragraph. If you want to reference more paragraphs, you can set the number of paragraphs like this:

[[org-journal:<tag-name>::<number-of-paragraphs>][<tag-description>]]

Run M-x org-journal-tags-link-get-region-at-point to select the referenced region of the buffer.

To add a tag to the entire section, run M-x org-journal-tags-prop-set, which will create or update the Tags property in the property drawer of the current time section. This command features a notmuch-like UI, i.e. completing read for multiple entries, where +<tag> adds a tag and -<tag> deletes a tag.

Database

The package stores tags and references to these tags in a database.

org-journal-tags-autosync-mode enables synchronizing the database at the moment of saving of the org-journal buffer. You can also run the synchronization manually:

• M-x org-journal-tags-process-buffer to process the current buffer.
• M-x org-journal-tags-db-sync to sync changed org-journal files in the filesystem.

The same mode enables saving the database on killing Emacs, but you can always run M-x org-journal-tags-db-save manually.

M-x org-journal-tags-db-unload saves and unloads the database from the memory, M-x org-journal-tags-db-reset creates a new database.

Status buffer

M-x org-journal-tags-status opens the status buffer with some statistics about the journal and tags. Press ? to see the available keybindings.

Pressing RET on a tag name in the "All tags" section should open a query buffer set to return all references for this tag.

Querying

Pressing s in the status buffer or running M-x org-journal-tags-transient-query opens a transient.el buffer with query settings.

• Include tags filters the references so that each reference had at least one of these tags.
• Exclude tags filters the references so that each reference didn't have any of these tags.
• Include children includes child tags to the previous two lists.
• Start date and End date filter the references by date.
• Regex filter the references by a regular expression
• Narrow to regex makes it so that each reference had only paragraphs that have a regex match.
• Sort sorts the result in ascending order. It's descending by default.

Pressing RET or e starts the query. Each file is cached on the first appearance, so the subsequent queries in the session are much faster.

After the query completes, it opens the results buffer. Press ? to see the available keybindings there.