User Manual

GravesDiary v0.1.1 — the same manual that ships inside the application
In This Manual

1. About this manual • 2. What GravesDiary is • 3. Getting started • 4. Writing • 5. Details • 6. Finding entries • 7. Exporting • 8. Sync • 9. Backups • 10. Keeping your diary safe • 11. Languages • 12. Accessibility • 13. Not yet in this version • 14. Support

1. About this manual

This manual describes GravesDiary 0.1: how to write in it, find what you wrote, keep it private and keep it in step between your computers. Nothing in it describes a feature that does not work; what is planned but not yet here is listed as such at the end.

2. What GravesDiary is

A private diary. Each entry belongs to a day. An entry has words, and can have a title, a rating, a mood, tags, the people it mentions, a place, and photos or other files. The diary is always encrypted on your computer, and it can keep several computers in step through a folder you already have, with no account and no server of ours involved.

GravesDiary sends nothing to GravesWare. See the Privacy Statement.

3. Getting started

The first time GravesDiary opens, it asks how to protect the diary.

With a password

The password is the key to the diary. You type it each time GravesDiary opens. Nobody can open the diary without it — and that includes you, if you forget it. GravesWare cannot reset it or recover it; there is no backdoor. Choose one you will remember, or keep it somewhere safe.

Without a password

GravesDiary opens straight to your diary. The diary is still encrypted, with a key kept on this computer that only your user account can read. That protects a copy of the diary file — in a backup, say — but not the diary from anyone who can sign in to your computer as you.

You can add, change or remove the password later in Settings.

Starting from a backup

If you already have a diary on another computer, choose Restore from a backup instead, and the diary comes from a backup file rather than starting empty. See Backups.

4. Writing

A diary here is a series of separate entries, each stamped with its own date and time — not one long page per day. Write as many entries in a day as you like: one over breakfast, another after a phone call, another at night.

GravesDiary opens on today: today’s entries, with the latest one open, or a fresh page if there are none yet.

New entryThe New entry button, or Ctrl+N. The entry is stamped with the current time, on the day selected on the calendar or on today. Right-click a day on the calendar for New entry on this day.
Date and timeThe date and time at the top of the entry are the moment it is about, not when you wrote it. Writing up yesterday’s evening this morning? Set them to yesterday evening. Entries made before every entry had a time show a dash until you set one.
TitleOptional.
TextType in the large area. The toolbar above it formats: bold, italic, underline and strikethrough; bulleted and numbered lists; left, centred and right alignment. Choose a format before typing and the words you type come out in it, or select text and choose a format to apply it. Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+U work too. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and the list buttons look pressed while their format applies where the cursor is.

Text pasted from elsewhere arrives as plain text, without the fonts and colours of wherever it came from.
EmojiThe smiley at the end of the toolbar opens the emoji picker: several hundred emoji in nine groups — smileys, people, hearts and sky, animals and nature, food, sport, travel, things and celebrations. Click one, or move with the arrow keys and press Enter, and it goes in where the cursor is. The picker keeps no list of what you used.
Right-clickRight-click in the text for Cut, Copy, Paste and Select all; bold, italic and underline; the two kinds of list; Insert date and time, which writes the current date and time where the cursor is; and Insert emoji. The Menu key or Shift+F10 opens the same menu at the cursor.
SavingThere is no Save button. GravesDiary saves a moment after you stop typing, before it opens another entry, and when you close it. The time of the last save is shown under the entry, with its word count.

An entry left completely empty is not kept.

5. Details

Below the text:

RatingOne to five stars. Click the rating it already has to clear it.
MoodFive faces, from awful to great. Click one to choose it.
TagsWords that group entries — “holiday, work”. Separate them with commas.
PeopleThe people an entry mentions, kept apart from tags, separated with commas.
PlaceWhere you were, in your own words.
FavouriteThe heart at the top of the entry.

Photos and files

Add photo or file attaches any file of up to 50 MB. Photos show as thumbnails; click one to see it full size, or a file to save a copy. Right-click an attachment to save a copy of it or to remove it from the entry.

Attachments are kept inside the encrypted diary, not beside it. A photo you look at is shown from memory; it is never written to a temporary file where something else could find it. “Save a copy” writes an unencrypted copy where you choose, because that is what you asked for.

6. Finding entries

The calendar

The month in the sidebar puts a dot under every day that has an entry. Click a day to see its entries, or to start one if it has none. The arrows change month; click the month’s name to come back to this month. Right-click a day for New entry on this day, or Show this day.

The timeline

The middle column lists entries, newest first, under a heading for each day that says how many entries it holds. Each entry shows its time, its title if it has one, and the start of what it says. It shows all of them, one day, or whatever you have chosen in the sidebar.

Right-click an entry to open it, add it to or remove it from your favourites, copy its text (date and time first), export it, or delete it.

Search

The box above the timeline searches titles, text, tags and people. Each word you type matches the start of a word, ignoring accents, or the word anywhere in the text: “lake walk” finds an entry that mentions a lakeside and walking, and a word in the middle of Chinese or Japanese text is found as well.

On this day

Entries written on today’s date in earlier years.

Favourites, tags and people

Each tag and person you have used is listed in the sidebar with how many entries carry it. Click one to see those entries. All entries goes back to everything.

Deleting

The bin at the top of an entry, or Delete on its right-click menu, deletes it after asking. A deletion syncs: the entry is removed from every computer that shares your sync folder, and its words are not kept anywhere. It cannot be undone.

7. Exporting

The export button at the bottom of the sidebar writes entries out of the diary to a file you choose:

WhatThis entry, what the timeline shows (a day, a search, a tag), or the whole diary.
FormatA web page (.html) for reading and printing, with photos in it; plain text (.txt); Markdown (.md), for notes apps; or JSON (.json), every detail of every entry with its attachments, for keeping or for moving to another program.

Entries are written oldest first, each under its date and time. An exported file is NOT encrypted: anyone who can open it can read it, so keep it somewhere private. GravesDiary sends it nowhere; it is written only where you choose.

8. Sync

GravesDiary can keep your diary the same on several computers. It does this through a folder that each of them can see:

- a folder inside OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive, with that service’s app installed on each computer; — a folder kept in step by Syncthing; — a shared network folder.

There is no GravesDiary account and no GravesWare server. GravesDiary writes its changes into the folder, and the service you already use carries them to your other computers.

Setting it up

  1. Settings > Sync. Type a sync passphrase.
  2. Choose folder, and pick the folder.

On each of your other computers, do the same with the same folder and the same passphrase. GravesDiary makes a folder called GravesDiary inside the one you chose.

The sync passphrase is separate from your diary password, and every computer must use the same one. Everything GravesDiary writes into the folder is encrypted with it, so the service holding the folder cannot read your diary. You are asked for it once per computer.

Without a passphrase, GravesDiary asks you to confirm, because the folder then holds your diary as readable text.

When it syncs

When it opens, about 20 seconds after you stop editing, every five minutes, when you click the sync button in the corner of the sidebar, and once more as it closes. The sidebar says when it last synced, or what is in the way.

Edits made on two computers at once

If an entry is changed on two computers before either has seen the other’s change — one at home, one on a train — both versions are kept. The newer one becomes the entry on every computer, and the other is kept beside it. The entry shows a notice; click Review to read the other version and, if you prefer it, Use this version. Nothing is silently thrown away.

What it needs from you

Let the service finish copying. A change made on one computer reaches the others only once the folder has been copied there; GravesDiary waits for files that have not arrived yet, and says so.

Do not put the diary itself in the sync folder. GravesDiary keeps the diary in its own place on each computer and puts only changes in the folder, because a database being copied while it is in use can be damaged.

A sync folder is not a backup. A deletion on one computer is a deletion on all of them. See Backups.

9. Backups

A backup is one file holding the whole diary: every entry, every photo and attached file, your tags and people, and your settings. It is encrypted, and it opens on any computer that has GravesDiary and the backup passphrase.

Settings > Backup and restore.

Setting it up

Choose a folder. Anywhere you can see from this computer will do: a folder on this computer, a USB drive, an external disk, or a folder that OneDrive, Dropbox or another service copies for you. A backup kept only on the same disk as the diary is lost with that disk, so somewhere else is better.

Set a backup passphrase and type it twice. It is separate from the diary’s password and from the sync passphrase. Every backup is encrypted with it, and it is all that stands between the file and whoever finds the USB drive, so it has to be a strong one:

  • At least 12 characters
  • An uppercase letter and a lowercase letter
  • At least 2 digits
  • At least 2 special characters, such as — ! ? # or @

The window ticks each of these off as you type. Several unrelated words joined with symbols and a number are both strong and easier to remember than a short tangle of substitutions.

THERE IS NO WAY TO RECOVER A FORGOTTEN BACKUP PASSPHRASE. Without it nobody, including GravesWare, can open a backup. Write it down and keep it somewhere that is not the backup drive.

Making backups

Back up now makes one straight away. You are not asked for the passphrase: it was needed once, to set it.

With “Back up automatically once a day” ticked, GravesDiary makes a backup when it opens if the last one is more than a day old. If the folder is not there — the drive is unplugged — it skips that day without interrupting you and tries again the next time it opens. The window shows when the last backup was made; that is where to look to be sure they are happening.

Each backup is a new file, named for the moment it was made, such as GravesDiary-20261002-193000.gdbackup. The ten newest are kept and older ones are removed. Other files in the folder are never touched.

Restoring

On this computer: Settings > Backup and restore > Restore from a backup. On a new computer: Restore from a backup, in the first window GravesDiary shows.

Choose the backup file and enter the passphrase it was made with. You may give the restored diary a password, or leave that empty to open it without one; a backup does not carry the old diary’s password.

The backup is checked from end to end before anything on this computer is changed. A wrong passphrase, or a file that is damaged or incomplete, is refused, and your diary is left exactly as it was.

The diary in the backup replaces the one on this computer. When you restore from Settings, GravesDiary closes, and the restore is finished when you open it again. The diary that was replaced is kept in the diary folder as diary.db.before-restore until the next restore, as a safety copy.

A restored diary keeps its backup settings, so the next backup uses the same passphrase. If you use sync, it carries on with the same folder, and anything written after the backup was made, and synced, comes back from it. On a new computer where the sync folder is somewhere else, choose it again in Settings.

Changing the passphrase

Set a new one in the same window. Backups made from then on use it. Backups made before keep the passphrase they were made with, because each backup file carries its own lock.

What a backup reveals

The contents are encrypted with AES-256. The file’s name, size and date are not, so anyone who sees the folder can tell that it holds a GravesDiary backup, when it was made and roughly how large the diary is.

10. Keeping your diary safe

Windows%LOCALAPPDATA%\GravesDiary\
Linux~/.local/share/GravesDiary/

The Microsoft Store version of GravesDiary keeps that folder where Windows keeps every Store app’s data, and Windows deletes it when GravesDiary is uninstalled. If you ever uninstall GravesDiary from the Store, make a backup first, to a folder of your own choosing, so that you can bring your diary back. A sync folder also holds your entries, but a backup is the whole diary in one file. See Backups.

11. Languages

GravesDiary speaks 55 languages. Settings > Language lists each in its own script; the choice takes effect when GravesDiary next starts. Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Uyghur lay the whole window out right to left. In the text itself, each paragraph runs in the direction of its own words, so an entry can mix languages.

This manual, the licence and the privacy statement are in English.

12. Accessibility

Screen readers

Every control that can be operated carries a name a screen reader can announce, including the stars, the moods and the formatting buttons. This is checked automatically on every build: a control that cannot be announced fails the build.

Keyboard

Ctrl+N starts an entry and F1 opens About. In the text, Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+U format, and the Menu key or Shift+F10 opens the right-click menu. The menus and the emoji picker are moved through with the arrow keys, chosen with Enter and closed with Escape. Dialogs close with Escape, and their default button responds to Enter.

Colour and contrast

GravesDiary wears the GravesWare colours, which follow your system’s light or dark setting. When your system is set to high contrast, GravesDiary sets its own colours aside and uses the plain system theme instead.

Size

Buttons and text fields are at least 44 pixels tall, the comfortable minimum for a pointer, a finger or an unsteady hand. GravesDiary declares itself aware of display scaling on Windows, so it stays sharp at 150% or 200%.

13. Not yet in this version

Planned, and not claimed until they work: export to PDF and Word (the web page export prints, and a browser can save that as PDF); import from other diary apps; templates; trackers; statistics; reminders; current location and weather; a map and a photo gallery; headings, quotes and colours in the text.

14. Support

GravesWare, LLC
support@gravesware.com

The address is also on the About page (the i button in the sidebar), with an Email Support button that opens your own mail program with the address and your version already filled in. Nothing is sent until you send it.

Please say which version you are running — the About page shows it — and which operating system. Never send your diary, your password or your sync passphrase.