Show HN: Ichinichi – One note per day, E2E encrypted, local-first

136 points by katspaugh ↗ HN
Look, every journaling app out there wants you to organize things into folders and tags and templates. I just wanted to write something down every day.

So I built this. One note per day. That's the whole deal.

- Can't edit yesterday. What's done is done. Keeps you from fussing over old entries instead of writing today's.

- Year view with dots showing which days you actually wrote. It's a streak chart. Works better than it should.

- No signup required. Opens right up, stores everything locally in your browser. Optional cloud sync if you want it

- E2E encrypted with AES-GCM, zero-knowledge, the whole nine yards.

Tech-wise: React, TypeScript, Vite, Zustand, IndexedDB. Supabase for optional sync. Deployed on Cloudflare. PWA-capable.

The name means "one day" in Japanese (いちにち).

The read-only past turned out to be the thing that actually made me stick with it. Can't waste time perfecting yesterday if yesterday won't let you in.

Live at https://ichinichi.app | Source: https://github.com/katspaugh/ichinichi

31 comments

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The read-only past is a really smart design choice. I build local-first apps and it's always tempting to add edit-everything flexibility, but constraints like this are what keep a tool focused and actually useful.

How does the Supabase sync work with the E2E encryption? Client-side encrypt before anything leaves the browser?

Nice, and I like the idea that the past is fixed, but ... is there a way to define the point of rollover to the next day? My "days" sometimes end at 0:50 for example and not at 23:59. So I might summarize the day a bit after midnight.
How does the E2E work in terms of user flow? I assume a you need a password?

Do you need to enter the password every time you open this?

I really like the idea, and I've actually built something similar. Please format the writing in the post sound less gpt-esque; I believe in the tool you're making and I believe it will improve marketing to people that share my aversion to that writing style.
Very cool! I'm curious as to why you removed ProseMirror after trying it out. I've been building my own writing app for a different purpose over the last month and have been pretty happy with PM, but I'd be curious to know what you're using instead.
Love it! The name, the design, the concept, the open source codebase, everything! It’s less like a note taking app and more like a diary writing app. I think that’s very neat and has its own niche.

Love the local-first, browser-based nature of it. If you ever consider making a native app for it, consider looking at antinote (https://antinote.io/). Been using it for over a year. It’s the only notes app that I haven’t uninstalled or forgotten about. I think the simplicity of it is what draws me to it. I feel it aligns with your philosophy for this app!

Thanks for sharing Ichinichi with the world!

Very cool! Also have a daily journaling app, hoping the space grows. I've gotten far more value out of journaling than I have out of note-taking.
For this purpose I wrote an app called Five Years Back: I can write one entry daily, but I can see what I wrote on this day for the past 5 years. My writing streak is… 1399 days as of today. Only me is using the app.

Good job and good luck!

A website where "sign in" is featured more prominently than "sign up"? You have my attention!
That divider with a time stamp on the right is very cute!

I am looking for, in a sense, the opposite of this app. I need an AI-powered IDE-like editor for markdown files. I keep a ton of research notes in markdown and when it comes to writing reports for admins and such, I need something to help me make sense of them, integrate them, reformat, do a "semantic refactoring" across files, diffs. etc. I saw people use Obsidian with some plugins, but I think I need Cursor for markdown. Any suggestions?

Append only logs >>> in-place writing and rewriting.

I mean, in real life, we call this a "diary" LOL. But even the fact that a mere "diary" doesn't have the same prestiege as say, all other forms of communication, I feel like just a tiny part of it was because it was generally hard throughout human history for the majority of people to write. Like most people were not knowledge workers, typing has definitely made it easier to write, and distribution of writing is prolific.

Obviously, there's actual benefits - compression, the concept of iterating on thoughts over and over, all of that is good.

But some of it I feel like is undeserved. Append only logs are great :D

Love the app. Wondering if it shouldn't be a rolling 12 month calendar perhaps instead of Jan-Dec. The reason being that once you hit January after writing daily notes for a year, you won't see your existing streak of dots of the previous 12 months. Just a thought.
Nice idea. Well done on the implementation.

One tiny nitpick - layout is uncomfortable. More than 1/4th of the screen width is taken by the calendar widget (and even more when there's multiple windows open side-by-side), and the editor widget/area is off-center.

Also, showing the weather in the note itself is a cool idea. It pairs well with the journal nature of the app.

Thanks for sharing!

This is a very interesting idea for a project.

At some point I was thinking about building something similar, but more in a wiki-style format where ideas could gradually accumulate and build up layer by layer. Unfortunately I never got around to it because of work and other projects.

Really nice to see someone exploring this space - I’m curious how the concept evolves over time.

This is very cool thank you,

How about an option that when you are editing the note, on the lower part of it, it show the note taken from the same day a year ago, Or a random past note…

I also think the home page (calendar view) can be improved, but i am not sure how, Anyway amazing app, thank you cheers

Thanks! Yes, “this day a year ago” would be cool! The app has only existed since January this year so I’ll look into it next year. :)
I love the idea and the implementation! However, I have a hard time remembering which day something happened, so I would constantly want to use a search function.
why not using normal paper notebook? one write, local storage

one question : why not?

Looks great; love the concept and the design. Reminds me in a way (conceptually) of a DOS program I used to use when I was at my desk more. It’s called Carousel, it’s one-file-per-day as well, but multiple topics which you rotate through (hence Carousel). I don’t need this kind of thing as much anymore, but I appreciate the creativity that goes into them, and knowing they’re out there.

Carousel: https://partytimehexcellent.itch.io/carousel