org-retro-journal: an emacs package for looking back through your journal

I’ve been journaling in org-mode since 2020. It’s a simple journal.org file in datetree format, where I add entries each day. One thing I never did is to go back and read what I had written. I really like the Memories feature in Google Photos where it shows what I was doing that day or around that day a year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago and so on. And I wanted a similar feature for my journal.

So, with some assistance from the LLM, I vibecoded an emacs package called org-retro-journal that does exactly this. The package scans each year to find entries from the same or nearest date in previous years. It then presents these in an ephemeral buffer. I even added a few keyboard shortcuts that enable the user to go backward and forward through time one day at a time. Or the user can pick a specific date and view past entries for each year around that date. I wanted the level of detail to be just the headings so that I could go into any of them to read more. Plus, these org subtrees are copied to the ephemeral buffer, so any accidental edits won’t affect the original file.

Screenshot

Here’s what it looks like in action:

This is invoked by calling the function org-retro-journal-review, which can be bound to any key.

Conclusion

This was a fun exercise. As mentioned earlier in this post, I co-developed it with LLM assistance. I’m not super proficient in Emacs Lisp to the point where I can write complex functions. Given enough time, I would have figured it out, but due to lack of time and LLMs being pretty good at writing code, I chose to use an LLM to assist me with this. The whole process took less than half an hour.