Jerd

A zero-friction, terminal-first tool for keeping a daily journal.

Documentation

• Introduction
• Quick start
• Installation
• User guide
  • Visual mode
  • Command mode
  • Tagging entries
  • Where it all lives

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Introduction

Jerd is a journaling tool that lives in your terminal, designed to make daily journaling and mood tracking as frictionless as possible.

Jerd handles the dates, folders, mood tags, and finding what you wrote three weeks ago — and when it's time to write, it opens your favorite editor, whether that's Vim, Neovim, nano, or something else, so you can just write. Everything else stays out of your way.

There's no database and no special file format. Every entry is plain Markdown, saved in ordinary folders on your computer. That means your journal is always yours — readable, movable, and backupable with any tool you already trust.

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Quick start

Three steps and you're writing.

1. Install it

npm install --global jerd

Just want to try it first? npx jerd init works too.

2. Initialize Jerd

jerd init

Jerd will ask for your name, ask you to pick an editor, and create a folder called jerd to hold everything.

3. Write

cd jerd
jerd

This opens Jerd's menu. Press w to start a new entry, choose a mood, write in your editor, then save and close. Jerd automatically files it under today's date.

Come back any day, run jerd again, and press f to find your existing entries. That's the whole rhythm.

Shortcuts:

• jerd new skips the menu and drops you straight into a new entry.
• jerd open [today/yesterday/2026-07-02] opens an existing entry.

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Installation

Prerequisites

• Node.js 24.18.0 or newer. Check your version with node -v, and update if you're behind.
• A terminal editor — nano, vim, or neovim. Jerd opens entries in one of these to write. If you don't set a preference, Jerd falls back to Vim, so make sure at least one editor is installed and available on your PATH.

Install

npm install -g jerd

Confirm it worked:

jerd --help

Choosing your editor

Jerd picks an editor in this order:

1. Your EDITOR environment variable, if set.
2. The editor set in your journal config.
3. Vim, as a default.

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User guide

Jerd works two ways: you can navigate it visually with a few keystrokes, or you can type exact commands. Neither is the "real" way to use it — pick whichever fits how you think.

Visual mode

If you'd rather look at a screen than remember commands, just run:

jerd

from inside your journal folder. This opens a home screen with four shortcuts:

Key	Does this
w	Write today's entry
f	Find an older entry
c	Open the calendar
m	View your mood graph

Writing. Press w, choose how you're feeling, and your editor opens. Save and close when you're done.

Finding an entry. Press f to search everything you've written. Arrow keys move through results, Enter opens one, Escape backs out.

The calendar. Press c to see your month at a glance. Days you've written on are highlighted. Arrow keys move between days, Enter opens the one you land on.

Mood graph. Press m to see how you've been feeling over the past month. Left and right arrows move between months.

If you run jerd in a folder that isn't a journal yet, it won't error out — it quietly starts setup for you instead, asking the same couple of questions you'd get from jerd init.

Command mode

Every screen above has a direct command behind it, if you'd rather type exactly what you want.

Start a journal

jerd init
jerd init my-journal

Leave off the folder name and Jerd calls it jerd. Either way, it'll ask for your name and your preferred editor, then save your answers for next time.

Write today's entry

jerd new

You'll be asked how you're feeling — calm, happy, sad, anxious, or angry — then your editor opens. To skip the question:

jerd new --mood calm

If today's entry already exists, jerd new reopens it rather than starting a second one.

Reopen a specific entry

jerd open today
jerd open yesterday
jerd open 2026-07-07

Jerd understands relative dates like today, yesterday, and 3 days ago, alongside exact ones. This only works on entries that already exist — use jerd new to create today's.

Search your journal

jerd find
jerd find "work notes"
jerd find yesterday

Jerd searches your writing, tags, dates, and file paths all at once. Leave it blank to see your most recent entries. As with jerd open, relative dates work here too.

Browse by calendar

jerd cal

Check your moods

jerd mood
jerd mood jul 2026

Add a month and year to jump straight there.

Tagging entries

You can tag any entry yourself by adding a line to the frontmatter at the top of the file:

---
mood: calm
tags: [work, planning]
---

Tags get pulled into search automatically, so they're worth using if you write about distinct areas of your life.

Where it all lives

Your journal is just a folder. Entries sit under a year and month, named by date:

my-journal/
  jerd.config.json
  2026/
    07/
      2026-07-28.md

No database, nothing hidden. Open it in any text editor, put it in Git, back it up however you already back things up.