Ubuntu Musings

As someone who writes for a living, I tend to take a lot of notes. For a while, I used an application called Tomboy for that purpose. It was a nifty little app, but it ran a bit slowly for my tastes, and I found that it could be more than just a little unstable at times.

On top of that, Tomboy needs something called Mono in order to run. To say that Mono is a bit controversial in the Linux world is like saying a monsoon is a little bit of rain. I’m not a zealot, but having Mono on my laptop to run a single application seemed like overkill to me. So, it was bye-bye Tomboy and Mono.

Since then, I’ve tried a few other pieces of software to keep notes, but none of them gave me the flexibility that Tomboy did. A while back, I heard about Gnote, which is a rewrite of Tomboy in C++. Of course, I decided to give it a try.

Gnote has caused its share of controversy, but I said … let’s just say two words, six letters passed my lips. I actually like Gnote better than Tomboy. It simply works better for me.

Getting started

My experience with Gnote came from the download and compile route. But it’s quickly found its way into a number of Linux distributions, and you can get it from the third-party software list in Ubuntu Tweak.

First time tried Gnote, I couldn’t get it to compile. The second time I gave it a shot, Gnote crashed more than Tomboy did when I used it. Third time (version 0.3.1) was a charm. Gnote gave me no problems. It compiled with no hitches, and starts quickly.

Working with Gnote

When you launch Gnote, it sits as an icon on the top panel. Click the icon to get a list of the existing notes and notebooks. Or, you can create a note (either standalone or in a notebook), or a new notebook itself. More on notes and notebooks in a moment.

Overall, Gnote behaves like Tomboy. Of course, you can type text into a note. The software has basic text formatting, like bold, italic, underline, strikeout, highlight, and fixed width text. You can also add bullets and indents, or change the size of fonts.

Gnote also enables you to link between notes or delete them at will.

Notes and notebooks

The basic units in Gnote are the notebook and the note. Notes are your actual documents. Notebooks are collections of notes that you can group under similar topics — for example, Outlines or Markets.

After you’ve created a note, you can associate that note with a notebook. All you need to do is click the Notebook icon on the toolbar and select the notebook want to add a note to from the menu that appears. You can also add a notebook from that menu.

Overall, Gnote is simple to use and does a really good job. It’s small and fast, although it doesn’t support plugins like Tomboy does. But that’s not a big deal.

What is a big deal is that Gnote does what I need it to do. The controversy surrounding it be hanged (and you can use your favourite search engine to learn about the controversy). I like Gnote. It’s useful. And until something better comes along, it’s going to be my note taking application of choice

Related posts:

1. Tomboy Notes and Firefox: together again for the first time
2. Sticky notes without the cluttered desktop
3. Taking another look at Zim desktop wiki

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.