A diary file is a simple plain text file. Empty lines or Lines starting with two hyphens (“-”) are treated as comments. Non-empty lines must start with a timestamp of the form “yyyy.MM.dd-HH:mm:ss” followed by one or more space characters. Following that comes a colon-delimited list of categories and their sub-categories. The timestamp at the beginning of the line marks the start of an activity of the specified category, with each starting activity terminating the one immediately preceding it. A line with just a timestamp and no category simply stops the previous activity without starting a new one. Comments between an activities start and its end are associated with that activity (though nowhere accessible in the GUI). They will retain their position when saving. Activities must be ordered in the file by their starting time. New activities will be inserted before any comments at the end which are not associated with an activity.
An example might illustrate this:
-- FILE ---------------------------------------------------------------------
-- name : work-boarderzone.diary
-- project : BoarderZone: Development Environment
-- created : Leon Poyyayil - 2004-01-25
-- language : English
-- environment: the human readers mind ... ;-)
-- copyright : (c) 1990-2024 by Leon Poyyayil (private), Switzerland
-- license : this is free software licensed under the GPL. see COPYING
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- log of the working hours spent in the boarderzone.net project
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- timestamp short job description
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
2005.07.01-22:32:25 tool: FileBrowser: plugin architecture
2005.07.02-04:35:11 tool: FileBrowser: basic plugins
2005.07.02-08:37:08
2005.07.06-22:03:10 tool: FileBrowser: basic plugins
2005.07.07-00:43:22 admin: build: 225
2005.07.07-01:12:18
-- EOF ----------------------------------------------------------------------