recommendations for personal journaling application

[Donnie Rhodes]

Hi. I've been sort of standing back on the sidelines reading this list
for awhile, and this is my first posting. So a little about myself and
my skill level. My name is Bryan. I'm new to Python and have very
little experience. I've gone through a few of the tutorials. I
understand the different data-types, basic syntax, functions and
function definition, basic iteration, and calling from modules.

I might be getting ahead of myself, but I think the best way for me to
learn things is by having a goal and working towards it. My goal is to
create a personal command line journaling application. I would like to
store all the entries in one file, have them searchable by keywords,
date, topic, etc... I think I would like to use "/*" type commands. For
instance, you call the application from a terminal window and start
with a generic prompt. You would type '/ne /t "topic"' to begin a new
entry and assign the topic; '/d' to set a date. You should be able to
use the slash commands while editing as well. For instance while
writing in an entry you could isolate a phrase or word with /k "phrase
to be marked as searchable keyword" / to mark the enclosed text as a
searchable keyword/keyphrase.

So what I'm interested in is how this would work. Is this 'event
driven' in nature? Would I define the bulk of these slash commands in a
function and then call it at the end of the script? What would be a
good module to look at for the text processing and searching aspects?
Anyways, I'm not sure how you would create a program that would
"listen" for commands and then parse them accordingly. I think for
starters I will sketch out on paper the slash commands I need, and try
to break apart the general operations into pseudo code. How would you
all approach this?

Thank you all and I hope I'm not biting off too much at once...