OLL is a simple application for keeping a One Line Log.

One line logs can be useful for many things. When I am asked "What have you been working on?" I can quickly check. I have also used a one line log for tracking running: using the log I could see more clearly where I first noticed an injury and how long I had it.

You can also use one line logs for various other tasks including recording notes on phone conversations or meetings, capturing ideas, recording reminders for a todo list, etc.

The idea behind OLL is that it has a small desktop footprint so that it can be run continuously. When you need to log something you type it into the edit box and press return or click on Log. A date time stamp and the log entry are appended to a plain text file that you can easily edit later.

I want to keep OLL very simple in terms of user interface and code. It will never be completely minimal because I am using Qt as I do with most of my projects.

Screenshots

Example Log

2017.02.05T22:22 OLL new icon finished
2017.02.05T22:23 Todo: build on Mac and Windows
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2017.02.07T20:10 Built and deployed Windows version
2017.02.08T23:43 Added more details to OLL web page

In this excerpt you can see the kind of output that OLL produces. The middle line is a rule.

Special Commands

There are a few special log commands, entered into OLL prefixed with a "command character". The default character is a forward slash. The commands are:

about

About OLL, including the version

export

Export a copy of the log to another file

help

Show some basic help

last

Open a window listing the last entries of the log

now

Copy the current time and date to the clipboard, using the date time format specified in the settings

rule

Add a plain text ruler line to the log file

settings

Open the settings window

quit

Exit

An example command would be /help

The command character is shown in the output if you run OLL from the command line.

The command character must be the first thing on the line, you can't enter a space or something else and then a command.

If you want to enter a log with the first character is the command character then enter the command character twice, e.g. entering //usr/bin will log /usr/bin

Tagging

Log entries can be tagged with a hash (#). The last and export commands take tags as parameters, or no tags for everything.

When using multiple tags the logical OR operation is used to determine if a log entry is matched.

Press tab when entering a log to get a list of recent tags.

Preemptive FAQ

What is the length of a line ?
The default maximum is 32k characters but for formatting purposes you should probably keep it less than 80 characters.

Do you support my language ?
Yes, logs are stored in UTF-8 text. The Windows version outputs a BOM at the start of the log so Windows can properly identify the text coding.

How do you specify the date time stamp ?
See the documentation for QDateTime::toString().

Downloads

File	Platform	Size	MD5
OLL-1.2-x86_64.AppImage	Linux	23 MB	077a9c90d83ebafad84c4d75a0f9d921
OLL-1.2.dmg	MacOS X	27 MB	fb4c3e7fa56e29dfc2f94c07aca34716
OLL-1.2-win.zip	Windows	19 MB	b360a70b211c8f3c231144bcb64c6fa8

Notes

The Linux version is packaged using AppImage to make a distribution agnostic executable. Download the file, rename it to OLL, make it executable using chmod a+x OLL and run.

For the Mac version, download the DMG, double click to mount it and copy the OLL application to your Applications folder. You may need to change your Security and Privacy preferences to allow you to run applications from "identified developers".

The Windows version is not digitally signed and therefore you may have to deal with annoying warnings claiming that this application is dangerous. Unzip the download and copy the OLL-X.Y directory to somewhere on your PC. You can then make a shortcut to OLL and place it on your desktop, copy it to your startup directory, etc. Open the log file in Notepad for editing.

Licensing

This software is licensed under the GNU GPL (version 3).