I like the idea of the tool but I think there are some areas where it could be improved.

• Storing the key as a filename at any point doesn't seem like a good idea. Maybe you could use an environment variable instead?
• This probably only affected me but in Turkish, i and ı are different letters. When I saw the Alt-I shortcut, I assumed it expected me to press Alt+i since that's what lowercase of I is in English but it actually expected me to press Alt+ı. Therefore, I think it might be better to use a letter other than i.
• There is no obvious way to navigate older entries. It seems like the correct way to access older entries is starting the program as "jern.exe <path/to/file.se>" but this is never mentioned anywhere and there doesn't appear to be a help command either (I tried /?, --help and -h, none of them worked). It would be nice to have a way to navigate to older entries within the terminal interface itself.

I am looking forward to future versions of Jern!

Handy tool can see a use for it saving keys password and things like that. The first time key generation would be useful as a prompt to make it easier.

Seams the saving the encrypted as base64 might be an unnecessary step could just write out the binary encrypted data but it’s not a problem just a thought.

The tool is very elegant in its simplicity and I can totally see myself using it. I always carry a key-shaped flash drive that I use to store my keepass database. I think I’ll add Jern to it and see how I get on with it (’<_ ’

I like minimal tools that focus on one thing and do it well. That's what we have here. I was easily able to understand it and use it. pageofmoths makes some great suggestions, but you've got a fantastic start and I hope you continue to develop it.

Nice submission, thanks for sharing!

This is a nice  tool! very cool

I like the idea of a text editor specifically writing encrypted journal entries. And for that it’s nice that your app starts up ready to write today’s entry! But otherwise I found the user interface very confusing. It’s a console app, which I guess isn’t so bad for being focused on text, but I expected to be able to just double-click it. It took me a bit to figure out that I had to create my own encryption key. It would be nice if it prompted you on the first launch to create one. I also thought it was confusing that the key and entries are both stored next to the executable, and not e.g. the CWD, since I thought the point was to keep them separate.

I love the UI and the concept. The editing experience is great, it works like a text editor should. The keyboard shortcuts could be more intuitive (Ctrl+S instead of Alt+S?) but at least I like that they’re always shown on the UI so I don’t have to remember them.

Things that could be improved:

1. mark it as an executable so that users don’t have to chmod +x jern themselves
2. prev/next keys/buttons to navigate through entries in chronological order. very useful for remembering what you wrote yesterday or last week, and referencing it in a newer entry
3. add support for other unlocking mechanisms, such as a passphrase, an OTP device, or a path to a key file stored in a removable medium.
4. as far as I can tell, the program did not generate a .k file for me. Or at least I don’t know where it is.

I can actually see myself using this as a pure journaling program (ignoring the encryption) to keep track of progress on projects. Consider posting it on hacker news or reddit when it’s more complete.