I prefer it over echoing into a file because it has more advanced display features - such as by date - and topics (hashtags [don't forget to escape the hash!], or @tags)
Got the journal files stored in Dropbox so they're everywhere I am
Mainly because I figured would rather use GUI for notes on both desktop and mobile. Maybe one of these days I should give Standard Notes a try (https://standardnotes.org). It’s OSS and client side encrypted (afaik).
The way I have jrnl configured is that the "work" keyword makes it log to work.txt as opposed to my default log.txt
I also have a "todo" which I've configured as a relative path ./todo.txt so I can drop todos into the current directory/project