I've kept a journal for a long time. Initially, I used to write in a diary. Since I started grad school and got my laptop though, I've been writing it in text files. It works for me in general, with a YYYYMMDD.txt file name. I've since started by masters by research course and I need to keep another journal, this time a research journal. While I could use another folder and follow the same method, I'd like my research journal to be a lot more easily referable than my personal journal in the future. I've been looking for sometime for a journal software. Here I'll share my findings. If you too want to keep a journal, you have a few choices:

1. The first is the `RedNoteBook`_. It's a pretty good personal journal. A clean, simple interface, good for daily writing. It works well. The one thing it missed was encryption. You can add tags to your diary entries too.
2. Another is `Almanah`_. While it does support encryption, it's too simple for my taste. It lacks tags and other features, which is what I was looking for, moving away from text files in the first place. It does have quite a few features lined up, but at the current time, I cannot use it.
3. The last one, and the one I finally decided to use is `lifeograph`_. Lifeograph let's you organize your posts. It keeps your writing encrypted. Best of all, it lets you maintain multiple profiles, therefore multiple independent journals. This means, I can use lifeograph to maintain both my personal and research journals. The other two applications did not do this, and while I could use tags to differentiate my two diaries, nothing's better than having two completely separate journals!

I've tried all of these because they're available in the Fedora repositories. You can simply run:

sudo yum install rednotebook almanah lifeograph

to install them and pick one that suits you. A few others that aren't in the Fedora repositories but seem to be good are journaler(which is open source now, but appears to be for Mac only) and robojournal. Robojournal looks impressive, uses MYSQL as a back end. I haven't given it a shot though, since lifeograph fits my needs. Using MYSQL might be slight overkill for a novice user? Upstream says support for sqlite etc. will be added in the future, which would certainly make it more useful.(It's up for review)

I haven't run into any others yet. I'm going to stick to lifeograph for the foreseeable future. Happy writing!