Losing my mind between Markdown and org-journal

Dammit I was this close to—no, actually, I was in the process of—abandoning org-journal in favor of dumber, easier Markdown files (using Drafts and BBEdit on the Mac and Editorial on iOS) to track daybook-things like when I paid bills and put paper checks in the mail. I thought org-mode files were too ugly when viewed in any non-org-aware text editor, especially on the space-cramped iPhone. I thought, “well, if nothing else, all this COVID-19 stuff is making me realize that life is too short to waste any more time than necessary on having a perfect system, and I might as well abandon having a perfectly consistent format since getting info into and out of Markdown is so easy, and I know I’m never going to back-enter all the old Markdown things into org-journal, so anything I search for in Emacs is going to be incomplete anyway, so why bother?”

So I started trying to figure out the One Perfect Date+Time+Heading+Notes Format for each entry in a Markdown file, and then I opened an org-journal file that had some old entries in it, and I thought, “well there’s the perfect format right there, already, and why am I reinventing the wheel?”, and then I clicked on a datestamp in an org-journal entry and up popped org-agenda and it all felt so nice and nimble and clean and fast and gorgeous. And then I thought, well, yeah, sure, but you can’t do a Spotlight search in Finder for the contents of an .org file, and then I started searching for why the hell that is the case, and that became a rabbit hole, and then I tested Spotlight searching for the contents of an .md file and THAT doesn’t work, either. (Yes, nvALT solves this, but I want to be able to search for a string in the Finder and find everything that matches.) And sure, I could use grep, but I’m not gonna do that in real life. So here I am again and I’ll just never figure this out.

Also, beorg, the brilliant iOS org-mode editor, doesn’t load subfolders of org-mode files. It just loads one directory of files, so that doesn’t help with org-journal files, which for me are all in /SOMEDIRECTORY/org/journal/.

I mean, just look at this. This is amazing, right?