UX: My next comment usually involves looking at my previous ones and keeping that flow. sometimes my journal has todos that i'm tracking; things like that.So having it all in one place is useful and the git log experience breaks that into two pieces: one to view the log to date and another to add a new log entry.There's probably an opportunity for a shell script that loads up the log in an editor, allows me to add an entry, diffs it on exit and auto commits.
Sometimes i'll enter the same text in both my commit message and journal; and some other times my commit message essentially says "look at the journal, too detailed to list here".
Intent: Sometimes I use the journal to track not just what i am doing but also what I should be doing. Alternate paths I want to try, philosophical sidebars on why I'm doing what I'm doing, etc. These entries explain to my future self why the project is in the state that I come back to it :). I'm not sure how I could put that into anything other than prose - since its not fully fleshed out code yet. I've tried design docs and that works sometimes, but usually I just want to jot down my thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness mode rather than figure out the right document to put the thought in. The journal works best for this. Later, I'll pull things from the journal into a design doc.
btw, another project idea of mine is to create a stream-of-consciousness editor: you create the content (code, meta-information about the code, whatever) as it "comes to you" and then figure out a place for it later. this is obviously the opposite of how our current file-based editors work, but in its simplest form its not that different in its implementation (autosave untitled files and allow them to be renamed, for example). What would be really cool is to have chunks of content belong to multiple documents, or being able to copy-n-paste by linking and so forth. Again, nothing that hypertext itself isnt already, just a concrete implementation in an editor context.
one more for "when I get to it" :)
I can see your email from your commits on halo, if that's alright I can get in touch through that address once I'm ready to open source what I'm working on.
edit: followed you on twitter. follow me back and i can pm you my email.