Notebooks & Journal

Notebooks and journal entries

A notebook is a collection that holds journal entries — one entry per sitting, in the order you write them. You're not limited to one: keep a single ongoing journal, or start separate notebooks for different purposes (a general journal, a pregnancy or NICU journal, notes to a specific person). Create one from your Library with + New > Notebook.

Inside a notebook, "Write today's entry..." starts a fresh entry. Everything else on this page — dates, streaks, the calendar, tags, export, and sharing — works the same way across every notebook you keep.

Writing an entry

Entries open in a rich-text editor by default — no special syntax needed. If you prefer writing in Markdown, switch to it from the editor's "⋯" menu; both modes edit the same entry, so you can move between them. Your writing saves automatically as you go (watch the small status pill next to that menu go from "Saving…" to "Saved"), and a local draft is kept as a backup in case a save doesn't land before you close the tab.

Add photos, audio, or video inline with Insert media — paste an image, drag a file in, or capture straight from your camera or microphone on a phone or laptop. Each upload shows its progress right where it will appear in the entry. Use Attach instead if you want to link an existing document or recording to the entry without embedding it in the text.

The day an entry is about

Every journal entry has its own date, shown as a small, editable field next to the entry's format label. By default that's the day you wrote it — but you can change it to any day, past or future. That matters if you're transcribing an old journal in one sitting, catching up on a week you missed, or writing an entry ahead of an anniversary: the date you set is what controls where the entry falls in your notebook's day-by-day order, not the moment you happened to type it.

This date is also what a shared notebook's date headers use, so anyone reading it — you or someone you've shared it with — sees entries grouped by the day they're about, not the day you got around to writing them.

The daily journal experience

A notebook's header shows "Write today's entry..." — or, once you've already written today, "Continue today's entry" instead, so returning to add a thought later doesn't start a duplicate. A "New entry anyway" link stays available if you genuinely want a second entry for the same day. Use the ← / → arrows in the entry editor's header to move to the previous or next entry without leaving the writing view.

Write on two or more consecutive days and a small 🔥 streak marker appears next to your entry count — it counts consecutive calendar days with an entry, based on when you actually wrote (not a backdated entry's date), and resets if a day is skipped. Entries in the list are also labeled "Today," "Yesterday," or a short weekday name for the last several days, so recent entries are easy to scan.

Toggle between the entry list and a month-calendar view from the notebook's view switcher — this preference is remembered across every notebook you open, not just this one. The calendar marks each day with a dot (one entry) or a small count badge (several), rings today, and lets you page between months. Click a day with one entry to jump straight into it; click a day with several to filter the list below to just that day.

Organizing with tags

Both notebooks themselves and individual entries can carry tags, with the same autocomplete and filtering the rest of your Library uses. Entries show their tags as read-only badges in the list; add or remove them from the full entry page. See Tags and Folders & Library for how tagging and organizing work across your whole Library, not just notebooks.

Exporting a notebook as PDF

From a notebook, Export as PDF opens a print-ready page: a cover with the notebook's title, date range, and entry count, followed by every entry in chronological order (oldest first) with date headers, images shown inline, and audio or video recordings noted as playable items rather than embedded media. From there, use your browser's Print dialog (Ctrl/Cmd+P) and choose Save as PDF — Killswitch builds the print-ready page for you, but the actual PDF file comes from your browser, not a server-generated download. Very large notebooks may hit a size cap on this export; you'll see a clear message if that happens.

Sharing a notebook

Turn on a notebook's public link, or send a share link to a specific person, and they get a read-only, searchable, sortable view of the entries — grouped by the same date-you-set-not-date-you-wrote chronology you see as the owner. They can download individual photos or recordings, or download the whole notebook at once.

Attach a notebook to a deadman switch to deliver it automatically to your beneficiaries when the switch fires. See What You'll Receive for exactly what a beneficiary sees and can do when a notebook reaches them, and Deadman Switches for how attaching items to a switch works.