My journaling app is Signal

I have been journaling on and off for years now, and decided to start afresh in 2026. As usual, this entailed choosing a suitable app. Day One? Org-mode? Silverbullet? Plain text files?

Sometime on the New Year’s Eve, an interesting idea struck me: why not just use a messaging app? Signal has a “Note to Self” feature, which is perfect for this.

Consider this: what do you need from a typical journaling app?

• Privacy, first and foremost. Signal’s whole schtik is that it is secured with end-to-end encryption, and they can’t see your data even if they want to. Unlike WhatsApp, Signal’s encryption implementation is open source and its code can be audited by anyone.
• Timestamped entries. That’s exactly what chat messages are.
• Media attachments? Sure.
• Search. You can do simple text searches across your history. I can’t imaging needing anything more sophisticated than that.
• Linked entries. If I make an entry for to set a personal goal and then want to add more entries for milestones/progress, I can just reply to the original message. The replies button lets me see all replies at once.
• Cross-platform sync? Pretty much. You don’t get a web app, but there are native apps for all major platforms, although the only ones I need are Linux and Android.
• Simple interface? You can’t get much simpler than a chat application.

And there you go. One fewer app to install. One fewer subscription to pay. Or if you’re a homelab person, one fewer sync to maintain.