SilverBullet ships with basic support for (daily) journaling. Each day you get a fresh journal page (by running the Journal: Today command). On this page you can capture what’s happening throughout the day, typically as a bulleted list. By linking to (topic) pages from journal entries, those entries automatically appear on the topic page via Linked Mention|Linked Mentions, building a timeline of activity for every topic you care about. You can freely mix this with a more Guide/Knowledge Base approach as you see fit.
As with anything in SilverBullet, this is a feature that’s fully optional to use. You can disable it wholesale in the Configuration Manager.
Press Ctrl-q j (default keyboard shortcut), or run Journal: Today. You will land on today’s journal page (by default Journal/YYYY-MM-DD) with a bullet list ready to go. Run it again later in the day and you’ll come back to the same page. The default space template will contain a button to navigate to this page quickly.
To navigate through your existing entries, use:
* Journal: Previous Day (Ctrl-q p)
* Journal: Next Day (Ctrl-q n)
* Journal: Picker
The day-stepping commands only cycle through entries you’ve actually already created before.
The real power comes from linking journal entries to topic pages. Instead of plain text, reference the pages that matter:
* Reviewed the Q2 roadmap with [Alice](Alice) and [Bob](Bob)
* Agreed to prioritize the API redesign
* [Alice](Alice) will draft the migration plan
* Started reading [Invisible Cities](Invisible Cities)
* Fixed a bug in the [Login Flow](Login Flow)
* Root cause was a missing null check in the session handler
Each [link](link) connects that journal entry (and its sub-items) to the referenced page.
Now navigate to any of the referenced topic pages. In the Linked Mention section at the bottom, you will see the journal entries that mention it, including the the surrounding context and sub-items. Tomorrow’s journal entry mentioning that same page will appear there too.
Over time, each topic page accumulates a reverse-chronological log of every journal entry that references it. You don’t need to manually maintain this log — it builds itself from your daily writing.
This works for any kind of page: people, projects, concepts, books. Your journal becomes the connective tissue between all your topics.
The easiest way to customize the Journaling feature is by configuring its various options via the Configuration Manager in the “Journal” category.
This option will enable the feature (specifically its commands) wholesale.
You can tweak the default journal template as you see fit. To do so, first make a copy of ^Library/Std/Journal/Template (the default one ships with SilverBullet and is read only), tweak it and set it as the template in journal configuration.
Journal entries default to Journal/YYYY-MM-DD. This Journal/ prefix is configurable.
By default journal pages are tagged journal. However, this is configurable as well. This tag is used by the various Journal commands for navigation.