RedNotebook is an open source diary & journal which is truly cross-platform – runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Keeping a journal is a good habit because it helps you to collect your thoughts and look back at the events that shaped your life. I was on the look out for a decent free journal software and I came across RedNotebook.

RedNotebook is the work of one man – Jendrik Seipp.

RedNotebook User Interface

The RedNotebook user interface is divided into 3 panes.

Rednotebook Journaling Software

Rednotebook User Interface

The first pane contains the Calendar on the top, and Search & Cloud tabs at the bottom. The middle (second) pane is the journal area – where you can jot down your daily thoughts. And the last pane (third) allows you to annotate and tag your journal entries.

To write an entry for a particular date, you should click on a specific date on the calendar on the left pane and start writing your thoughts in the middle pane. You can toggle the middle pane between the edit mode and preview mode.

What makes RedNotebook an ideal personal diary software ?

A few things really… but above all, it does the job of keeping a diary or journal trivial. Let’s look at some of its features.

  • Tagging – You can associate multiple tags to each of your journal entries.
  • Support for spell checking.
  • Format your text bold, italic or underlined
  • Insert Images, files and links to websites
  • Web links and mail addresses are recognized automatically
  • Search as you type functionality
  • Automatic saving
  • Backup all your entries as a zip archive.
  • Word Clouds with most often used words and tags – Helps you find a specific journal entry quickly.
  • Templates support – You can insert templates of specific tasks at the click of a button. For instance, RedNotebook comes with three inbuilt templates namely – Help, Journey,and Meeting. But the cool thing is, it allows you to create your own templates too.
  • Export the journal to PDF, HTML, Latex or plain text
  • Your data is stored in open, human readable format – plain text files, no database is needed. In my opinion, this is one of the top selling points of RedNotebook. Your data is not locked to a proprietary file format.

Is RedNotebook the best journal software ? I will say, it is the best journal software money can buy. For all the features it sports, RedNotebook comes at an unbeatable price – free.

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