WriteLightly is a console based personal journal/diary manager that uses the curses library to build a minimalistic user interface. It features an interactive calendar, support for tags, edit history for each entry and more.

Diary entries are date-based - you can create one entry for one day. To write entries you can use your favorite editor (I use Vim, for example) which will be invoked each time you need to create a new entry or edit an existing one. After editing the difference between the old version and the new one (if any) along with the time of modification will be saved.

To use tags, include a line of comma-delimited words prepended by a label. Default label is TAGS: (can be changed in the configuration file). For example:

TAGS: flowers, waterfalls

python setup.py install

Then you can use wl to run WriteLightly.

• wl - show a calendar for the current month
• wl today - open up editor to edit the entry for today
• wl 2011-01-01 - open up editor to edit the entry for 1 January 2011
• wl -t - show a list of all tags ever used
• wl -t flowers - show a list of entries for tag "flowers"

Calendar mode: use arrow keys and hjkl to move around, H and L to switch months, Enter to edit the selected entry. List mode: down arrow/j, up arrow/k to move down or up; Ctrl-E, Ctrl-Y to scroll; g, G to go to bottom or top, / to search.

Configuration file is stored in ~/.writelightlyrc. Default config is created by setup.py. You can change there all key bindings used by the program and some general options like the directory for storing data, external editor, etc.