Guest Post: New Ways To Journal.

On learning more together.

Photo by Carl Jorgensen on Unsplash

Hello All:

I am excited to kick off a new series of guest posts that showcase their favorite tools, tips, and learnings with you.

Today’s post is by

Alessandro Magionami

, a seasoned software engineer, on a transformative journey. Subscribe to his newsletter,

Devlizioso

for insights on software, leadership, and productivity. Elevate your skills and make your mark in tech!

We all enjoy different tools in our journey online, and some become favorites, fast. Alessandro shares one of his favorite tools below.

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Hello Everyone! I tried several note-taking apps, including Evernote, Obsidian, Notion, Neorg, Neovim, and SimpleNote.

All those apps are great, but they did not fit my needs well. After a lot of research, I finally came across LogSeq. I fell in love with it.

Here are the main reasons you should consider trying it for your writing.

Part 1: Why

1. Journal

LogSeq has a unique system called “Journal.”

The Journal contains a page for each day and creates a new page at midnight every day. It is super handy to add new resources when you still don’t know where to put them. You can also record vocal notes directly into LogSeq; I add them into the Journal, too, and once I listen to it, I put a written version of those in a dedicated place.

The Journal works perfectly as your read-it-later place.

2. Collect research

The Journal is also great for collecting resources.

As writers, we also connect many resources; having them in one place to revisit them later is great. I add links, videos, and my notes directly into the current day of the Journal, and I revisit that when I have some time to organize my notes. The Journal is excellent with the browser extension of LogSeq, available for both Chrome and Firefox and also works with the native “share” of the smartphone.

Collecting all your resources chronologically ordered in a single place is excellent.

3. Visualize your notes

LogSeq has a “graph visualization” showing your notes as a graph.

By using that visualization, you can see the connection between your pages. If you are a fiction writer, you can have a page for every character. Thanks to that view, you can visualize your characters’ connections.

While using LogSeq, your graph will grow over time, and you will start seeing connections between your notes you couldn’t imagine.

4. Sync across multiple devices

LogSeq is available for Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Accessing your notes at every moment is crucial. Imagine being out without access to your laptop and needing to read a note or write down something. For me, it is impossible to live without my notes.

Having access to your notes at any moment is crucial.

LogSeq Sync

LogSeq has a way to sync your notes across all your devices.

You can access that only by being a backer of the project; it is worth the price. It will happen that you start working on a device and need to finish on another one, so having your notes synched is very important. Also, Sync is a backup for your notes, and your data is encrypted.

I started working without Sync and activated when I realized I couldn’t live without LogSeq anymore.

Version Control

LogSeq keeps the history of your pages.

You can enable this feature using LogSeq Sync. LogSeq Sync keeps track of versions of your page automatically, and you can look at your page history in the app itself.

Pages might live long, so tracking changes is a must-have.

5. Data security and privacy

Security is not only for tech people.

A note-taking app can be used to keep our thoughts and our work. LogSeq is a “privacy first” note-taking app. An app that is focused on privacy and security is a huge plus.

LogSeq encrypts all your data, keeps them safe, and ensures you are the only one who can access them.

6. Using additional features via the marketplace

LogSeq has many features, but you can also have more through plugins.

The marketplace offers more than 150 plugins. These are some of my favorites as a writer:

• logseq-long-form: toggles a long-form mode in LogSeq, it turns off the blocks for LogSeq, improving the experience of long-form writing

• logseq-wordcount-plugin: another handy plugin to have a real-time counter for words while you write

• logseq-chatgpt-plugin: enables ChatGPT directly into LogSeq

These are the plugins I consider the best as a writer, but there are many more to adapt LogSeq to your needs.

7. It’s free

Yes, LogSeq is a free software.

And no, you won’t have to click on a popup “Maybe later“ appearing while working. You can make a donation or become a backer to support the project. But you can consider this option once you are sure LogSeq is the right tool.

You don’t have any limit on the number of pages or the length of your notes.

8. Community

A community means that the tool will evolve.

LogSeq has a Community Hub where you can find excellent resources. There is also a very active Discord channel. Communities are a source of information and a great way to know people with the same interests.

Explore the Hub, join the Discord Channel, and start following the evolution of LogSeq.

Part 2: How to start using LogSeq

You can download LogSeq from the official website. It isn’t available in the app stores, so you must download the mobile version from the website.

Create a new graph

Once you have it, the first thing to do is add a new graph.

This can be done by clicking on the top left corner.

After that, you will be asked to select a folder or create a new one. LogSeq will use that folder to store your notes.

Adding your first note

Opening your new graph will show the current day’s Journal page.

From there, you can immediately start adding notes:

To add that note to a specific page, you can type the name of the page in the same block of the note wrapped in square brackets:

While typing, you’ll notice that LogSeq will start suggesting existing pages, or you can click the “New Page” section to create a new one and press ENTER.

Clicking on the [[my page]] link will bring you to the page where you can see the linked references to that page:

The Journal with the browser extension

The Journal is where most of your content will be added in LogSeq.

The best way to start using it is by installing the Browser Extension of LogSeq (Chrome, Firefox). Once you have the extension installed, you can navigate to a page you want to add to LogSeq and click the extension icon in your browser:

This will add a link in your Journal to the page:

The first part is the time you added the link; the second is a specific page called “quick capture,” which contains all the links added by the extension, and the third is the link to the page you added.

Conclusion

This is an opinionated list of why I chose LogSeq as my writing tool.

You can visit this post on my website for more tips about LogSeq and how I use it as my writing tool.

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