Private Journaling with Encrypted Markdown —
No Cloud Required

A journal is the most personal thing you write. It should be the most private thing on your device. Most journaling apps store your entries on someone else's server. Claspt keeps them on your machine, encrypted, with biometric unlock and zero internet requirement.

Why Most Journal Apps Fail at Privacy

Popular journaling apps like Day One, Journey, and Penzu sync your entries to their cloud servers. Even with encryption, your data passes through infrastructure you do not control. Their privacy policies grant access for "service improvement," "abuse prevention," or "legal compliance."

This is not theoretical. Day One's iCloud sync has had documented issues where entries appeared on the wrong accounts. Journey stores data on Google's infrastructure. When you write something deeply personal, you are trusting not just the app maker but every cloud provider, CDN, and backup service in their stack.

A journal entry about your mental health, a difficult relationship, or a career decision should not exist on any server. It should exist on your device, encrypted, accessible only to you.

How Claspt Works as a Journal

Claspt is not a journaling app — it is a general-purpose encrypted notes app. But its design is ideal for journaling:

• Local-first. Your vault is a folder on your local filesystem. No account required. No internet required. Works in airplane mode.
• Markdown-native. Write in the same format used by millions of writers and developers. Headings, bold, italic, lists, links — all work.
• Encrypted blocks. Use :::secret blocks for entries you want encrypted. Or use full-page encryption (Pro) to lock entire journal entries.
• Biometric unlock. Touch ID, Face ID, Windows Hello, or fingerprint. Open your journal with your face or finger — no password typing.
• Git versioning. Every save is a Git commit. You can see how an entry evolved, what you edited, and when.

Setting Up a Journal Vault

Create a folder structure that works for daily journaling:

Journal/
├── 2026/
│   ├── 01-January/
│   │   ├── 2026-01-15.md
│   │   └── 2026-01-16.md
│   ├── 02-February/
│   │   ├── 2026-02-01.md
│   │   └── ...
│   └── 03-March/
│       └── 2026-03-02.md
├── Gratitude/
│   └── weekly-reflections.md
└── Goals/
    ├── 2026-goals.md
    └── quarterly-review-q1.md

Tag entries for easy retrieval: mood:good, topic:career, topic:health. Claspt's full-text search and tag filtering let you find entries in under 100 milliseconds, even across years of daily writing.

A Daily Entry Template

# March 2, 2026 — Sunday

## Morning
Woke up at 6:30. Good sleep — 7.5 hours. Went for a
run along the waterfront. 5K in 28 minutes.

## Work
Finished the API refactor. The new pagination approach
reduces query time from 800ms to 120ms. Felt productive.

## Evening
Dinner with Sarah and Mark at the new Thai place on
Ponsonby Road. Good conversation about starting a side
project together.

## Reflections

:::secret[Private Thoughts]
Thinking about whether to bring up the promotion conversation
with David this week. I have been at this level for 18 months
and the feedback has been consistently positive. Need to
prepare specific examples — the API project, the mentoring
work with the junior developers, the incident response
improvement.

Salary expectation: $X — based on market data from Y.
:::

## Gratitude
1. Beautiful weather today
2. The API fix — satisfying when things click
3. Good friends who make time for dinner on a Sunday

Most of the entry is plaintext — searchable, diffable, and readable in any text editor. The private section about career thoughts and salary expectations is in an encrypted block, decrypted only when you choose to reveal it.

Why Not Full Encryption for Everything?

You might wonder: why not just encrypt the entire entry? You can, with full-page encryption (Pro feature). But for most journal entries, selective encryption is better:

• Searchable. Plaintext entries are indexed by tantivy. You can search for "dinner with Sarah" or "morning run" across years of entries instantly. Fully encrypted pages require decrypting everything into memory first.
• Git diffs. You can see what you edited in a plaintext entry. Fully encrypted pages show as one large binary change.
• Faster. No decryption overhead for the 80% of your journal that does not need to be secret.

Encrypt the sensitive parts. Leave the rest as the portable, searchable markdown it was designed to be.

Mobile Journaling

With Pro, Claspt syncs your vault across desktop devices via Google Drive. Mobile apps for iOS and Android are coming soon — when they arrive, you will be able to write journal entries on your phone during a commute and have them sync to your desktop vault when you get home.

The sync is encrypted end-to-end. Google Drive only sees ciphertext for your secret blocks. Your plaintext notes are readable by the sync service, but sensitive content stays encrypted.

Your Journal, Your Device

Claspt does not require an account. It does not require an internet connection. Your journal is a folder of .md files on your device. If Claspt disappears tomorrow, you still have your markdown files — readable in any text editor.

No startup will ever read your diary. No data breach will ever expose your private thoughts. No terms-of-service change will ever affect your access to your own writing. That is what local-first means.