Tired of piles of notes spread across txt files, emails and TODOs? With git-journal you can organize your ideas in a neat way that:

• tracks history
• allows you to make branches and not forget about what you've done before
• trace back your though process
• allows you to merge successive ideas into mainstream
• gives you a whole lot of possibilities that git gives you

Just issue make install. It will simply copy git-journal script into /usr/local/bin. To uninstall just do make uninstall.

Setup journal for your git repo

git journal init [journal dir]

This will create journal directory inside your repo and add "journal" section to your repo config (not global, of course). If you don't specify [journal dir] argument there will be created journal directory by default.

If you already have journal repo hosted elsewhere, you can clone it:

git journal clone [repo path] [journal dir]

journal directory is a git repo itself and it is not tracked by your parent repo, so you don't have to modify gitignore.

The new commands for journal mode of git are:

• git journal add
• git journal edit

These are just wrappers around git commit with some sanity checks.

Adding a new record to your journal is a simple

git journal add

This will invoke a text editor where you can write and edit a message.

Journal records are commits inside journal repository with a notable exceptions:

• It does NOT change containing parent repo
• It does NOT create any files (there are no tree objects)
• It's a same old git history that you can play with

If your project got a new side idea just go to journal repo and branch!

cd journal
git checkout -b what-if

Later you can merge it back as usual

git checkout master
git merge --no-ff what-if