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

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.

This is a very useful app. I use it to manage to- do & shopping lists, edit blog post drafts, and keep project notes. It syncs seemlessly with the custom repo on my server. All the files are standard markdown documents making them easy to edit in Vim on my desktop computer. The developer is very responsive. I submitted a bug via an email link from within the app. He responded a few hours later to clarify the problem, and followed a few days later to report he had fixed it.

There's a bug that can happen when you have external storage issues, Android 13. It can happen if you change the external location too often and too soon, and it may happen because you are doing it while the app is trying to move the files. I thought I lost all my notes but they were just saved in a different location. Despite merging them I can't get the app to read the notes in the subfolders. GitJournal also doesn't want to recognize FairEmail as an email client, so I can't submit bug reports

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