The journal

The journal is a part of Papyra, next to Notes and To Do. One page for each day, kept as an ordinary Markdown file in your own folder. It is private: it is never shared, never sent to a webhook, and an @name in a journal page stays plain text.

Where the files are

Each day is one file, in a folder for its year and month:

/data/users/<you>/notes/journal/2026/10/2026-10-25.md

A day is only a file once it has something in it. Opening a blank page makes nothing, and a page you only open and leave never counts as a day. The front matter carries kind: journal, and mood: (1 to 5) when you chose one. Everything else is the text you wrote.

Writing a day

• A new day begins at midnight in your time zone, or later if you ask: Settings → Journal → A new day starts at goes up to 5 a.m., so something written at half past one still belongs to the day that felt like today.
• How the day felt is five small pictures, Rough to Great, beside the date. The shape of each carries the meaning, not only its colour. Once you choose one it folds into a small chip with its name; tap the chip to change it.
• The page fills the window, empty or not, so there is always room to start; a long day simply runs past the bottom and scrolls.
• The date opens the calendar, on that day’s month.
• Notes & to-dos (top right) opens a panel beside the page with to-dos that still have something open and recent notes, each a tap from a link; it stays closed until asked for.
• Focus takes the day over the whole browser, with only the date and the writing. Esc leaves the text, then leaves Focus.
• Type / for what a day is made of: the date, a link to another day or a to-do, a photo, a voice note, an embedded to-do list, and the five moods.
• [[ links to a note, a to-do or another day. Say a day the way you would out loud: yesterday, last fri, sep 14, 3 days ago, 2024-03-02.
• A to-do inside the day. Embed a to-do shows its checklist in the page. Ticking a box there ticks the real to-do. The day’s file only holds a reference, so nothing is copied and nothing drifts.
• Carry over brings the unticked items of the latest earlier day into this one.

Calendar, streak and “on this day”

Journal → Calendar is a month laid out like an almanac page: a wash for each day’s mood, a dot for writing without a mood, a small lock for a locked day, a thumbnail when the day has a picture. A year view sits beside it. A day counts for the streak when it has words or a mood. Settings → Journal → Hide the streak removes the count and keeps the totals. “On this day” shows the same date in earlier years.

Photos and voice notes

Drop, paste or pick pictures as you would in a note. A day with two or more pictures shows a strip of small thumbnails under the page; choosing one scrolls to it.

Voice note records in the browser (it asks for the microphone once) and puts the recording in the page like any attachment. If your Papyra has a speech model set up (Whisper:ModelPath), the recording is sent as a 16 kHz WAV and, a little later, the words appear under the player as an italic line. Without one, you simply keep the recording. A single recording stops at ten minutes.

Locking a day

Lock in the page’s footer seals the day with the same vault PIN as locked notes. On disk the text is scrambled; the mood and the size of the day stay readable so the calendar and the streak keep working. Settings → Journal → Locking can lock new days as they are made, or every day you have already written.

Locked days are listed on the Vault page too, in their own Journal section beside locked notes and to-do lists: you see the date (and the mood, if you set one), never the words. Each section there folds away; Papyra remembers which ones on that device.

This protects the folder, a Git remote and your backups. The server holds the key, so anyone who can run your Papyra can read what you wrote; it is not a diary that even you cannot recover.

Exporting your journal

Settings → Data & Storage → Journal export downloads just the journal, two ways:

• Markdown files: a zip laid out like your journal folder (journal/2026/10/2026-10-27.md, one file per day), with the pictures and recordings those days use under media/.
• PDF book: every day with writing (or a mood) in one small book, with a cover, a contents page, then each month on a fresh page with its days run on, in Papyra’s own typefaces. Headings, lists, ticked and unticked tasks, quotes, code and pictures are laid out; [[links]] print as their names. What a page can’t play is drawn as the small card it is in the journal: a voice note as a mini player with its name and length, a video as its still with a play button, and a map, a web page or a document as a card saying what it is and where it points, each with its caption underneath. Latin scripts print from the book’s own faces; other scripts print only if the server has a font for them, so use the Markdown export when you need every character.

Both are guarded like the full export: unlock your vault (PIN or passkey) and enter a code from your authenticator app (or the one emailed to you). Locked days are included, readable, because you opened the vault to ask for them; days in the Trash are not. Your account gets an email saying that a journal export happened.

Templates and a reminder

Settings → Journal → Templates keeps pages a blank day can start from, with {{date}}, {{weekday}} and {{streak}} filled in. They show as “Start from” chips on an empty day; one can be the first offered. Starting from one saves nothing until you add words of your own. Templates are plain .md files under .papyra/journal-templates/, outside the notes folder, and they travel in backups.

Settings → Journal → Reminder sends one short email at the time you choose, only if that day is still blank, and never says anything about what the journal holds. It is off until you turn it on and needs email to be set up.

Bringing a journal in

Settings → Data & Storage → Import has two journal options:

• Day One (.zip): the JSON export, with its photos and recordings. Each entry lands on the day it was written, in the time zone it was written in.
• Daily notes (.zip): any zip with files named for their day, such as 2024-03-02.md, in any folders. This is how an Obsidian daily-notes folder looks.

A day that already has writing keeps it: what comes in is added underneath, under “Imported from …”. Importing the same file again adds nothing. Locked days, days in the Trash and days that have not begun are left alone, and the summary says how many.

Scripts and agents

Make a key with scope The journal only (Settings → API Keys); its token starts with papyra_j_. It reaches /api/journal and nothing else:

# What's today's page?
curl -H "X-API-Key: $TOKEN" https://papyra.example.com/api/journal/today

# Add a line to today, without reading it first
curl -X POST -H "X-API-Key: $TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text":"Shipped the release."}' \
  https://papyra.example.com/api/journal/2026-10-25/append

A key can read and write days, but never archive, lock or delete one and never change settings. It sees a locked day’s date, mood and size, never its words, and cannot write to one. A key for notes cannot touch the journal at all. Writes are credited to the key in the day’s history.

Backups and export

Backups and the zip export carry journal/ along with everything else, and the templates and journal settings come with a backup. In a backup, locked days travel sealed under vault/journal/ and need your password to restore; in the zip export, which you confirm with your vault open, they come out readable in the same folder. See Backups and git.