GitJournal - Notes with Git

GitJournal

In-app purchases

About this app

Git Journal is a note taking / journaling app built with privacy and data portability in mind. It stores all its notes in a standardised Markdown + YAML header format or plaintext. The notes are stored in a hosted Git Repo of your choice - GitHub / GitLab / Gitea / Gogs / Any Custom-provider.

Features -

- Offline First - All yours notes are available offline
- No Account Required
- Categorize your Notes with Folders
- Open source / Free Software / FOSS
- Can easily be extended and integrated with other Git tools
- Can also be used to manage Hugo / Jekyll / Gatsby websites
- No Ads
- Built with Flutter


Never need to import / export your notes, as you always have control of the data. Apps may come and go, but your notes will always be with you.

The app comes with a clean, easy to use interface designed to focus on just writing your journal entries without any distractions.

We have chosen Git as a backend as self-hosting a Git server is much simpler than almost any other software, additionally there are already many commercial providers of Git. So you can choose who you want to trust with your notes. We currently don't support encrypting the notes, but it's something we're actively working on.

Ratings and reviews

It is very handy that Git integration is baked into the app. This makes it easy to install and link with a Git repository. Unfortunately the text editing experience is not great at all. Opening a document containing more than a few pages makes it frustratingly slow. When searching for a keyword, the search bar indicates the number of matches found, but the arrows don't jump to the found results. This makes the app unusable. In contrast, Obsidian combined with GitSync is a great experience.

I've been looking for something like this app for years. I started writing it myself a few times. I am delighted that I've found it, and it's better than I expected. Keeping the notes in a git repository means you can host your own work independently, and access it from anything. It even allows you to put checklists into notes, and attach files. Negatives: 1) a few slight UI problems 2) only ssh remotes, no Https 3) the lowest paid level is quite a bit more than I was expecting (about £20)

I want to love this. There are just so many little paper cuts that I can't ever rely on it. I had to go thru huge heroics and mess to change the default branch from 'main'. And it regularly just says 'failed to save note' and you have to force close. Dev has also removed subscription part, so guessing it's abandoned or will be soon.

What’s new

* Add support for YYYY-MM-DD in the YAML frontmatter
* Add a button to export the repo as a zip
* Small bug fixes