I’ve been saving notes, bookmarks, quotes, etc. in Day One for a while now, however, today I began the switch to Gollum.

Benefits of Gollum

  • Powered by Ruby and multiplatform (as opposed to Day One, which is only available for Mac and iOS)
  • Flatfile structure (Day One saves files in some peculiar property list type files, Gollum uses .md, .txt, etc.). This allows for the organization of entries into folders.
  • Wiki-style linking (much easier to navigate than Day One, which is only navigatable by date)
  • Much better search (Day One search lags and the way it displays results isn’t very helpful in finding which post you want)
  • Powered by Git. This alone is a very good reason to switch to Gollum. Being able to revert to previous versions of entries is amazing.
  • Faster. Day One has some lag on my computer.
  • Open source, free, updating, and hackable. Day One is shareware. Gollum is made by the folks at GitHub and the source is available on GitHub. It updates often and it has a growing userbase.
  • Live preview editor. Preview markdown output while you’re writing markdown. Awesome split screen editor.
  • Allows for external editors. It’s almost impossible to use an external editor to edit entries in Day One.
  • Built-in web server. Gollum serves its data over a web server that can be accessed on other devices.
  • No need for export. Day One’s inconvenient exporting (can’t export all entries with each entry as an individual file) has bothered me for a while now. With Gollum, there is no need to export, because pages are stored already as markdown files.
  • Syntax highlighting
  • Support for other markup languages (besides markdown)

Where Day One is still better

  • Journaling purposes. Day One’s chronological sorting makes it ideal for journaling. The time of creation of entries is also more promiment (Gollum also shows it, but only shows the time of the last edit, at the very bottom of each page. Time of creation may be found in the filesystem or using Git. Could easily be hacked to show date more prominently though).