diary: Almost functional

I found a clever little application that is so marginally functional, and so utterly simple that I decided to overlook its shortcomings and hold it out for public view anyway.

It’s diary, and I’ll go ahead and include a small fork of it too, in diary-f.

Both diary and diary-f are bash scripts that use standard Unix tools — like grep and date and so forth — to come up with a functional diary suite.

Using it is simple enough — trigger diary and you leap into your $EDITOR, preset with today’s date.

Ostensibly, you make your entry and saving it drops you back to your shell.

That’s where I usually run into trouble, because the original diary — but not the fork, which is why I included it — relied on the merge command, which I can’t track down outside of online man pages.

Ultimately that means the original diary will almost always report an error. The fork, however, seems to be okay.

The fork also adds a little (and subtracts a little, I think) in reviewing date ranges and a couple of other flags.

Either way, diary and diary-f are fun little scripts that do quite a bit without becoming giant plodding programs. 😉