a free journaling app

what free means here

the whole app is free: every page, every pin and trail, search, and export. it is not a trial and nothing unlocks later. sync between two devices through the hosted relay is free too, and running your own relay is free on every device. what costs money is hosted sync for more than two devices, and the numbers are on pricing. you do not sign up for anything to start writing.

what people mean by the best app for journal writing

ask for the best journal app and the answers weigh the same few things. does it run on my phone and my computer. does sync cost money. can anyone else read it. can i leave with my entries. the honest answers for shizumu are on this page. the part a list of apps rarely covers is what the app asks of you each day, and here it asks nothing: the page opens empty, and you write.

who it fits, and who it doesn't

it fits people who journal to think something through: a decision, a hard week, a project that keeps coming back. if you want a daily prompt, a mood chart and a photo on every entry, day one is built around that, and a mood tracker like daylio does the charts well. shizumu is for the writing itself, and for getting back to the parts of it that mattered.

android, and the other platforms

if you came looking for the best free journal app on android, here is where this one stands. android is a closed test on google play: leave the google account you use on your phone on the android page, and a link comes back that turns on the test build. after that it updates from play like any other app. on linux it installs from flathub (x86_64 and arm64), and on windows from a setup exe. mac is a beta download, and iphone is a testflight beta.

private by default

the writing is a database on your device. you open the app and write: it does not know who you are, and nothing leaves the device unless you turn sync on. sync is optional and end-to-end encrypted: the relay holds what it cannot read, and neither can we. the keys never leave your devices. read how sync is encrypted and what the relay can and cannot see.

it is local-first, so pages open and save without a connection and search runs on the device. if you use sync, it catches up when you are back online.

what a page, a pin and a trail do for a journal

a new page starts empty. you write to think. when something turns out to matter, you pin it, and the pin points back to the page it came from. a trail is for a project, not a day: a book, a job search, anything you'll come back to tomorrow. choose a trail and the page picks up context: the pins you already kept there, already on the page. everything else lives in memory: search it, or open one trail, one date, pages, or pins.

moving your entries in, and out

entries from another journal paste straight onto a page, and pasted markdown keeps its headings and lists as blocks. on the way out, every page exports as a markdown file into a folder you choose, and settings can make a full backup of the database. a journal you can leave with is easier to trust.

open source

the app and the relay are on github, apache-2.0 on the client and agpl-3.0-or-later on the relay, so what it does with your writing is something you can read rather than take on trust. the longer version: an open source journaling app. or try it in your browser first, with a few weeks of writing already in it.