There are some journaling apps that target this mindset. This one[1] was posted a few days ago (in comments) and stores your notes as markdown in plain text. There are others (I am working on one as well, but its not ready). If the app forced a particular naming convention (e.g. 2018-05-10.md) would that be too restrictive?

[1]: (https://github.com/fabiospampinato/notable).

No. Not really. http://jrnl.sh/ looks good too if you're starting from scratch.

If you're looking for something simple like jrnl but as a desktop app with a GUI, you might be interested in Mini Diary which I just launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18934610. It also allows you to import your jrnl data and export your entries in a variety of formats.

vscode-journal and vscode-journal-view (gives you a calendar view in the side bar) do what I need and are offline.

I have vscode open anyway so path of least resistance applies.

Thanks for the recommendation, been looking for something like this.

It's really good, I just set the base path to point at a dir in Dropbox path and that's it, I have a autosyncing journal on all my computers.

Thanks for the heads up on this one! Looks great.