Capture template like org-journal

Question

I would like to setup an org-capture template for my journal entries that mimics org-journal.el. The difference is, I want my journal to live in one file.

Here is an excerpt from the github page to see what it looks like:

* Tuesday, 06/04/13
** 10:28 Company meeting
Endless discussions about projects. Not much progress

** 11:33 Work on org-journal
For the longest time, I wanted to have a cool diary app on my
computer. However, I simply lacked the right tool for that job. After
many hours of searching, I finally found PersonalDiary on EmacsWiki.
PersonalDiary is a very simple diary system based on the emacs
calendar. It works pretty well, but I don't really like that it only
uses unstructured text.

Thus, I spent the last two hours making that diary use org-mode
and represent every entry as an org-mode headline. Very cool!

** 15:33 Work on org-journal

Here is what I have so far:

;; org-capture settings.
  (setq org-capture-templates
        `(("j" "Journal entry" entry
           (file+headline "~/org/journal.org"
                          ,(format "%s"
                                   (format-time-string "%A, %y/%m/%d")))
           ,(concat "* " (format-time-string "%H:%M") " %^{Title}\n%?")
           )))

This has three problems:

1. I can't figure out how to add a blank link in between entries.
2. Org-capture keeps adding a blank space to the left of %?. No idea what is causing this
3. The time stamp does not increment after the first time I run this?

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This is the best I get:

      ("j" "Journal" entry (file+olp+datetree "~/org/journal.org")
       "** %<%H:%M> %?\n")

It generates entries like this

* 2018
** 2018-03 March
*** 2018-03-20 Tuesday
**** 20:45 test 1
**** 20:46 test 2

It solves the 3rd problem. Seems like using %<...> is the cleanest way to get a time-related string format. See https://orgmode.org/manual/Template-expansion.html#Template-expansion

The answer from @kshenoy might be problematic for you since it will add a line for before and after the captured content (refer to this), therefore effectively separate each entry with 2 empty lines. I don't have a solution to that.

Answer 2

Try setting :empty-lines 1 as described here.

Answer 3

You can try the empty-lines option, but that didn't work for me. I had a related problem. If I went to the end of the capture buffer and typed, then the newline character would be lost. This was a problem because the next line in the file was a header - and this header now appeared at the end of the last line of whatever I captured when it saved it to the file.

I solved this by this hook:

  (defun add-newline-at-end-if-none ()
    "Add a newline at the end of the buffer if there isn't any."
    (save-excursion
      (save-restriction
        (goto-char (1- (point-max)))
        (if (not (looking-at "\n"))
          (progn
            (goto-char (point-max))
            (insert "\n"))))))

  (add-hook 'org-capture-prepare-finalize-hook 'add-newline-at-end-if-none)

In your case, you may need to check/add two new lines to ensure a blank line.