Looking for some software for a personal diary, I came across the following two utilities for Ubuntu:
It’s a pretty good diary option, but has a very major drawback – the diary entries are stored in plain xml on your hard disk and it doesn’t need a password to login. In fact, it doesn’t have a password option. If you want a diary just to take notes of your daily tasks or an alternative to an online blog (why?), you can go ahead with this.
This is exactly what I was looking for. It has password protection, keyboard shortcuts and easy to use interface. It even has a shortcut to insert the time in your diary post! It’s as if the developer was reading my mind. I would highly recommend this for anyone looking for a personal diary. Just remember that it needs gtkspell installed for python otherwise it won’t even start. If you’re using ubuntu, just search for it in synaptic and install the python libraries for gtkspell.
Update:
Alamanah (updated link)
Almanah looks good, but again the main negative for this one, just like thotkeeper, is that it isn’t password protected. But apart from that it has a nice calendar and the ability to store the diary entries in encrypted format. One unique feature about Almanah is the ability to add a definition to some text. This definition can be used to link your text to a file, note or a URL. Pretty neat. Plus it’s available in synaptic, so you can give it a shot.
Update (23rd Sep, 2011):
Another personal diary option brought to my notice by Amit in the comments below. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to run on my Debian setup (yes, I’ve moved to a virtualbox Debian installation from a full blown Ubuntu install) and many of the dependencies seem to be in the unstable repo. But the screenshots look good and the features look great. It has been sometime since it was last updated (~10 months), but hopefully it will make it to stable some day.
Emptiness in void 