The Sosta Logbook handbook

Journaling in the margins

Most journals ask for a sitting: a blank page at the end of the day and the discipline to fill it. Sosta Logbook asks for the opposite — a line in the margin, written the moment it occurs. You finish a call and note what was decided. You switch tasks and log where you left the last one. A thought surfaces on a walk and you catch it before it’s gone. This is interstitial journaling: the record accretes in the gaps, so keeping it never competes with the work.

Because the notes are small and constant, the log ends up more honest than a nightly summary. It holds what you actually thought at 11:14, not the tidied version you’d reconstruct at midnight. This handbook covers everything in that loop — writing, freezing, tagging, and searching — and the details particular to running Sosta as its own app.

Writing an entry

An entry is just markdown. Type a line whenever there’s a pause; a leading # heading becomes the note’s title, and everything below it is the body. You never choose a folder or a notebook — the moment you wrote it and the words you used are the only filing the log needs.

• Timestamped entries. Every note is stamped with the instant you wrote it, down to the minute, and the log reads as a true chronological timeline rather than a pile of undated pages. On the standalone Mac app a menu-bar Quick Entry lets you drop a line without leaving whatever you’re in; in the browser the same capture writes straight to a .sosta file on disk. The timestamp is the entry’s spine — it’s what the timeline orders by, what the freeze is measured from, and what search falls back to when you’re scanning a particular afternoon.
• Derived titles. You don’t maintain a title field. On every save Sosta derives the title (and the tags) from your markdown — the # heading if you wrote one, otherwise the opening line — so the text on disk is always the single source of truth. Rename by editing the words; there’s no metadata to drift out of sync with what the note actually says.

The freeze, and why it matters

• The freeze window. A configurable window — 24 hours by default — after which an entry locks and turns read-only. On the native app a timer runs the freeze on schedule even while the app sits in the menu bar. Once an entry freezes you can still add new notes about the same topic today, but you cannot quietly rewrite what you wrote yesterday. That single constraint is the difference between a journal and a draft: the past stays a record of what happened, not a document you keep editing until it agrees with the present. If you want a longer or shorter grace period, the window is yours to set.

Finding anything later

A log is only worth keeping if you can reach into it, so retrieval gets two dedicated tools.

• Inline #hashtags. Drop a #hashtag straight into the prose — a project, a person, a theme — and Sosta extracts and indexes it on save. Tag a thread once and every mention becomes a facet you can pull on later. Tags are shared across the wider suite, so a tag means the same thing in your tasks and your wiki as it does in the log.
• Full-text search. Search runs over titles, hashtags, and bodies together, BM25-ranked and weighted so a title match outranks a passing mention. A phrase you jotted six months ago is a keystroke away, and the ranking means the entry you actually meant tends to surface first instead of drowning under near-matches.
• Activity heatmap. A quiet calendar shows how often you showed up — a map of your momentum you can read at a glance, without a streak counter nagging you to keep a chain alive. It’s there to reflect the habit back to you, not to gamify it.

Rich blocks — tables, checklists, the occasional diagram — render inline while staying plain markdown underneath, so a structured note is still just portable text you own.

Import from Day One

Already keep a journal in Day One? Bring the whole history across without retyping a word. In Day One choose File → Export → JSON, then in Sosta open Settings → Import, pick Day One, and point it at the exported Journal.json.

Sosta reads each Day One entry as a timestamped note and keeps its original date and time, so your history lands on the days it actually happened rather than collapsing onto the day you imported. Entries old enough to sit past the freeze window arrive already frozen — exactly as a note that age would be — so the imported log obeys the same honesty rule as one you wrote here. The import runs as a dry-run preview first: it tells you how many entries would be created and lists anything it skipped and why, and nothing is written until you confirm. It’s also safe to run twice — entries you’ve already imported are recognised by a stable id and skipped, so a re-run never duplicates your journal.

Sosta Logbook is free at its core, needs no account, and keeps your journal on your device. When you want to see how it connects to the rest of the pile, the full suite is one link away.