My journals from ten years ago are still on my computer because they were saved as text files. The journals I kept in apps that no longer exist are gone, or trapped in export formats I never quite trust.
Cozy is the journal I wish I'd had then. Every entry is a plain text file. The journal is a folder. The app is just a nice way to look at it.
What's actually in the folder
When you set up Cozy, you pick a folder. Inside it, each entry is a plain text file with a date, a short bit of structure at the top (mood, location, tags), and your writing below it. Photos sit next to the entries they belong to.
Open the folder in your file manager and it looks like what it is: a diary you can read with anything.
File over app
The phrase "file over app" came out of the Obsidian community, and it's the rule I built Cozy around. Apps come and go. The files should outlive them. The only way to make that real is to write into a format any computer, in any decade, can still open.
A folder of plain text files is the most boring, durable thing on a computer. That's why Cozy uses it.
Plain text isn't ugly
The file is plain. The app isn't. Cozy renders your writing with proper typography, soft colors, a calendar, ambient sound to write to. The plainness is underneath, where it matters — so your journal keeps working even if you stop using Cozy.
Works with the rest of your toolkit
Because Cozy writes plain text files, you can:
- Open the same folder in a text editor for quick edits.
- Back it up with any backup tool.
- Search it with normal computer search.
- Sync it with iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or Syncthing.
- Move to a different app later, without an export step.
Related reading: a private journaling app, an offline journaling app, and Cozy vs Obsidian.