Pass with caution!

Archive for October, 2007

Tomboy – A very useful application

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Project URL : http://www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/

In the recent versions of all Linux distributions a relatively new application has found its way. It is called Tomboy. It is in parts like Paste-it’s, note pad, cross-indexing tool and quick publisher all rolled in to one. Tomboy is also very addictive and easy to use and does away with hassle of naming files and remembering the directory paths. Tomboy is an evolving application and the latest release is still version 0.6. However even at this early stage it is very robust and already many official/unofficial plugin are available to enhance the application even further.

Start Tomboy by clicking Applications > Accessories > Tomboy Notes, this launches Tomboy as an applet appearing on your menu tool bar. Once launched it remains active and you can access your notes quickly from the applet icon till you log out or quit the applet. You can also launch Tomboy every time you log in by adding this application in auto-start menu accessed from System > Preference > Sessions > Start-up Programs. Click the new button to add “Tomboy” in name box and “tomboy” in command box. Next time when you log in Tomboy will be started automatically.

With time you tend to forget the file name in which you had saved your work or the directory where your file was located, desktop search tools are useful but comparatively cumbersome. Using Tomboy you do not have to remember and open any particular file under your directory tree. All your notes are stored under the name of the heading and what’s more they are indexed.

Tomboy creates its own hidden directory under you home directory. To see the contents of this directory you can “enable” view hidden files option in Nautilus and browse the contents, although there is no real need to do this.

Working on any Tomboy note very quickly accomplished by just two clicks. First click on applet icon, in the tool bar, gives you list of all notes that you have made in order of recent use. With second click select the note from this list to start working. You can launch multiple notes at the same time and you can open close or open notes as needed. The list of notes that are displayed is limited. If you want a note to always appear in the list you can make it sticky by clicking on the “pin” icon against the note so that even if is not of recent use it will not disappear from view. The list also allows you to create a new note or to search for some text pattern in existing notes. Saving notes is as easy as just closing the note, no need of giving file name or directory to store, Tomboy does that on its own.

When you start a new note Tomboy gives it a sequential heading automatically. To change the heading all you have to do is overwrite the default heading with your own. In effect the heading of the note is also the file name. So Tomboy does not allow you to have two notes of the same name and warns you when closing a note with same heading to change this. The interface is very simple as there are only five simple menus and place to write your note. The menu items in the notes window are Search / Link / Text / Tools / Delete. As the name implies search menu opens search
dialogue box where you can define search criterion. It returns a list of all notes that contain your item with number of occurrence in each note. You can directly click on search results to open any note.

While writing a note if you select a word(s) the link menu become active. if you click on this a new note with the highlighted word(s) as note heading is started. The highlighted word can also be given special formatting from the
options available under the Text menu. Although limited the text formatting options are sufficient. Standard short cuts of copy, cut, paste, bold, italic also work. Delete menu deletes the current note. To prevent accidental deletions a conformation box appears. Tools menu gives rise to many more possibilities and we will discuss this a little later.

To make life easier Tomboy has some cool features like Spell check, Auto-linking and Hyper linking. Plus there are many plugin available that can enhance functionality. Spell checker will highlight any word that you spell wrong by underlining
in red. By bringing the mouse cursor on top of the misspelt word and right clicking you get menu for looking at alternates words. You can also add custom words to the dictionary so that these do not show up as wrong spellings henceforth.

Auto-linking is one of the best features of Tomboy. This application indexes all words that are written in a note and compares them with headings of all notes that you have made. If it finds any word (or combination of words) matching heading of an existing note then this word(s) is uutomatically highlighted in red and a link is created to that note. On clicking the linked note is opened. This makes a great way of making cross referenced notes. Not only this if you change the heading of a note which is linked from some other note the words in that note will also change to show new heading! Watch out as this can have unintended consequences too. This is also reason that you should keep headings unique and not confined to single words.

Tomboy also works with hyper-links, both internal as well as external. For instance if you write full path to a local file, say file://home/sudev/test.odt then a hyper link is automatically created within your note. When you click on this your system will fire up the associated application and opens the target file. In this example the writer program will be launched with test.odt file. A great way of embedding your files in to the notes and not having to remember directory tree. You can have multiple file (links) in one note and multiple notes may link to one file.

Similarly when an external hyper-links is clicked it fires up your browser and the URL is opened within that. The moment you write and website URL or an email address it automatically creates a hyper-link. Clicking on an email address starts a compose (write to) window of your mail program.

“Note of the Day” plug-in is not turned on by default. Once this feature is turned on then every day a new note is generated giving date as the heading with two sections for tasks and appointments. If you do not add any content
then this note is automatically deleted. This is similar to maintaining your daily diary.

Installing a plug-in is easy. A rather interesting and important plug-in is the “Remind” plug in and following the description below you can also start using this. First download the binary from http://raphael.slinckx.net/files/tomboy-reminder.dll Now open the plug-in folder by right clicking on applet icon, it is the first menu choice. Drag and drop the downloaded file in to this folder. Quit and restart Tomboy and then use preferences menu to enable Remind plug-in Now if in any note you write “Remind 15 August” the words will automatically highlighted in yellow indicating that a reminder has been set. On 15th August this note will automatically pop up when Tomboy is running. If you are busy and close the note it will keep popping open every half an hour till you delete the reminder. Such convenience! You can write reminders in many formats. “Remind sunday” “Remind 23 August at 11:30am” are all valid formats. Look up Tomboy home page or check out on the internet on additional information and other plug-in that are
available.

There is no limit to length of note and you can write pages worth of text in to one note. However practically it is easier to break up notes in to many smaller notes. Or to write long details in a file and give a file link in a note summarising the same.

Now we come to tools menu. One basic choice is printing notes which opens print box with usual printing options. Another option is to see what notes link to the current note. You can navigate to any of these notes by just clicking on the name. The most interesting option under this menu is Export to HTML. With this you can create a web page from your note with just click of a button. The pop up box also offers you choice of exporting only the current note or all notes that are linked with the current note. Not only linked notes are published in the web page intra-links are also created so that you can click and navigate from the html page. How can this be a killer feature that can enhance the functionality of Tomboy? Simple, just copy paste the output html page to your web directory and you have a published document! In our organisation we have configured web-server to allow personal pages. We cut paste the html output to our personal
web-folder and send email giving the link to people we want to share with. This way we can share information and also update the same by re-publishing from updated Tomboy note very easily.

figure1.png : Launching Tomboy