Journaling With LaTeX

PUBLISHED ON 21/01/2020 — EDITED ON 07/09/2026 — TECHNOLOGY

Intro

Lately I have been looking into journaling again. I am working on my 5 minute journal for a while now, but I wanted to extend it. As a coincidence, my friend “watts” pointed out his solution and I have jumped into it.

Journaling

Tools

LaTeX
Vim
UltiSnips
vimtex

Stoic quotes

5 minute journal displays a random stoic quote for every day. To emulate that we can use the fortune program with additional stoic quotes, found here.

% git clone https://github.com/npankaj365/stoic-fortune.git
% sudo cp stoic-quotes* /opt/local/share/games/fortune
% fortune stoic-quotes
Epictetus Quotes
What decides whether a sum of money is good? The money is not going to tell you; it must be the faculty that makes use of such impressions – reason.
Discourses I, 1.5

UltiSnips

~/.vim/UltiSnips/tex.snippets

snippet journal "Journal" b
%-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
\begin{loggentry}{`date +%d/%m/%Y`}{$1}

\subsection{Morning}

`fortune stoic-quote`

\paragraph{I am grateful for...}
\begin{enumerate}
  \item $2
  \item $3
  \item $4
\end{enumerate}

\paragraph{What would make today great?}
\begin{enumerate}
  \item $5
  \item $6
  \item $7
\end{enumerate}

\paragraph{Daily affirmations. I am...}
$8

\subsection{Evening}

\paragraph{Three amazing things that happened today...}
\begin{enumerate}
  \item $9
  \item $10
  \item $11
\end{enumerate}

\paragraph{How could I have made today even better?}
$12

\subsection{Daily thoughts}
$0

\end{loggentry}

endsnippet

TODO: Random stoic quote from fortune package could be formatted better.

I edited the UltiSnips shortcuts a bit:

~/.vimrc

...
let g:UltiSnipsExpandTrigger = '<tab>'
let g:UltiSnipsJumpForwardTrigger = '<tab>'
let g:UltiSnipsJumpBackwardTrigger = '<s-tab>'
let g:UltiSnipsEditSplit="vertical"
...

So when you are ready to write a journal entry, open the .tex file and do this:

journal<tab>

Then, <tab> will take your cursor to the next part (the $x variables in the UltiSnips config) and shift+tab will take you one step back.

vimtex

\ll builds the pdf file.
\lv open pdf and forward search
\ll \lk stop compilation
\le parse error log
\lc clean aux files
\lC clean pdf files

git

Great idea is to use a local git repository to track changes. Here is a handy .gitignore file:

*.aux
*.glo
*.idx
*.log
*.toc
*.ist
*.acn
*.acr
*.alg
*.bbl
*.blg
*.dvi
*.glg
*.gls
*.ilg
*.ind
*.lof
*.lot
*.maf
*.mtc
*.mtc1
*.out
*.synctex.gz
.DS_Store
*.fls
*.fdb_latexmk