Do you use Tomboy daily? What for?

[zanglang]

/DISCLAIMER/: I am a Gnome SoC 2007 student applicant. I have already submitted my application, but I'm really interested in looking into daily usage patterns among frequent Tomboy users. :)

Explanation on poll:
- You _can_ vote on multiple items. A lot of us use Tomboy for very diverse things. I use it as a light scratch pad yet I also write whole reports with it, for example.
- You _can_ vote on the last option if you don't use Tomboy for a certain reason, or if you hate Tomboy with a passion. Please reply and say why! (But please don't select any other option then... it wouldn't make sense would it.)
- Even if you don't use Tomboy /daily/, but just once a few days, or seldom add things to it but frequently look at the contents in it for reference, please vote as well.

Feel free to comment on this thread any ideas, interesting uses, complain about the sad lack of network awareness... Feel free to flame too, if you really have the urge to. I'd want to know why you dislike Tomboy!

Edit: Wow, I'm getting more responses than I expect. The statistics are turning out to be quite interesting... Thanks a lot guys! :D (But please do vote if you haven't ;))

[FyreBrand]

I used Tomboy for a little bit to keep track of school notes, lab notes, and code snippets. It was good for what it does and I liked it, but I don't like using mono apps or having mono installed. I'm just not sold on it and there are other applications that don't use mono.

[zanglang]

I have to agree with you there, actually. VMs like java and mono seem to put an extraordinary load on my aging laptop... but I do believe they'll become more popular and usable in the future when more of us have better machine specs to run them. :)

[gabhla]

I've used it and liked it; but, use the notes feature in Opera.

[groggyboy]

tomboy has become an essential part of my computer use, and the newest version (the one in the feisty repos) is a vast improvement over the one in edgy.

mono or not, if a program is useful i'll use it - and tomboy most certainly is that.

[ComplexNumber]

i rather like tomboy. i think its a neat and convenient little application. i use it for the following:
-random notes to jot down whilst they are fresh in my mind
-reminders of things to do in the near or distant future

i use it a lot.

[Adamant1988]

I'm learning to love it. The wikified nature of the program let's me keep all of my data VERY organized.

[zanglang]

I've used it and liked it; but, use the notes feature in Opera.
I haven't used Opera before. How's their Notes feature like? Or more importantly, what made you switch? ;)

[raublekick]

i love Tomboy, but i never use it! it's weird, i always have it on my panel, and i look at it, and i think about how awesome and useful it is, but i never use it!

any tips?

[X86]

I don't hate it with a passion.....lol
I just don't use it but it can be handy........

[zanglang]

i love Tomboy, but i never use it! it's weird, i always have it on my panel, and i look at it, and i think about how awesome and useful it is, but i never use it!

any tips?
Check out the poll options. Each of them (except the last one of course ;)) represents a possible use for Tomboy. Try creating a note called To-Do List and write things you're going to do over the course of the next few days, or write down deadlines for homework, or names and phone numbers while you're on your cell, or shopping lists.

If you can somehow get version 0.6 for your Breezy it would be even better. :)

[zubrug]

tried notes but returned to opera notes, use it for saving quotes, address', comands etc. simply double click my note and it takes me right there just like a bookmark. Opera is my browser and email client of choice so it's notes are simply so convenient in dealing with quotes/email/commands/links blah blah blah........

[AndyCooll]

i rather like tomboy. i think its a neat and convenient little application. i use it for the following:
-random notes to jot down whilst they are fresh in my mind
-reminders of things to do in the near or distant future

i use it a lot.

This basically sums up my usage too, one of the most important apps I use.

:cool:

[raublekick]

Check out the poll options. Each of them (except the last one of course ;)) represents a possible use for Tomboy. Try creating a note called To-Do List and write things you're going to do over the course of the next few days, or write down deadlines for homework, or names and phone numbers while you're on your cell, or shopping lists.

If you can somehow get version 0.6 for your Breezy it would be even better. :)

yeah, the problem is i generally think of that stuff while i am doing things like driving, or working, and so on, so by the time i get to my laptop i'm just like "hey i'm gonna go waste time on the internet!!1!" :)

i'm using Edgy, i have just been too lazy to change the distro on the forums...

[Mr. Picklesworth]

I do wish Tomboy was a bit more snappy (as Mono improves I bet that will happen), but that doesn't stop me from using it constantly!

If I am writing something, I usually have an outline in Tomboy with a bunch of different notes holding different sections. If I owe someone something, I have a note there. (And I used to have it remind me about it on a daily basis with a Reminder plugin, but I don't know where that has gone). If I am writing software I leave comments, reminders and design sketches in notes. I use it for just writing in a reliable environmnent outside of a web browser or some such in the same way as Windows' Notepad. (Except Tomboy is way better thanks to autosaving!)

My favourite part is not deleting notes :b It's just weirdly fun having a link randomly appear without me thinking about it and a nice break not having to worry about managing files in a coherent manner. (Warning: Do not look at your .tomboy directory, it is scary).

I do wish that it didn't format text quite so much like a Wiki. I hate having to leave two spaces every time I want to change back from formatting text like a title, and the lists just work weirdly. Also the text formatting choices don't sound very useful as merely "small, big, bigger, huge". I would like them with more descriptive names and purposes, like "Title"!

I have had some weird problems where links, formatting and spellchecking will disappear spontaneously as I type, described in this thread. (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=293942)

I recall reading that Tomboy's first list of features is filled out and one of the next things to be done is a tagging system, so that will be indeed cool.

I hope that it will be possible to create a note with alternative titles, so that the actual title of the note could be really long though someone could just write a shortened version of that title and get a link to the same note. Also the ability to add / remove links to any note with any text would be useful. I've had this problem with a few collections of notes, where I really wanted to have links to notes just appear conveniently but have instead wound up having to have "See also" links at the bottom. (Try conveniently linking to "Coleridge's Use of Opium" or "Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2 3GB/S 7200RPM 16MB Cache NCQ Hard Drive" midsentence).

In the future, it would be awesome if Tomboy could handle a simple web site accessible via the network running under an installed web server package. (And if there was a notes sharing feature, and other multi-user stuff like that).

Oh, and the Export to HTML plugin is awful. Who in their right mind thought it would be sane to have it list the same page for every single time it is linked to? Having "Include all other linked notes" makes sense, but it looks redundant on first glance and maybe should be the other way around since I bet most people do expect it to include every single linked note recursively by default. Why are all those notes crammed into one page? It's HTML, so why not have them seperate?
Printing, too... I wanted to print a whole collection of notes once so to save time I tried exporting to HTML so that I could get them all on the same page without trouble. Of course that didn't work well since I ended up with 50 copies of the same note listed, but it was the only way available to recursively print every linked note. (Except for manually, which is painful).

So there is my ramble-fest of a review / wish list for Tomboy :)

[Wolki]

Mostly to paste stuff quickly without having to clean up files afterwards, and for some quick notes. I don't use it as much as I want to, but as it increases in features I feel it becoming more useful to me. Synchronizing between computers and some basic categorization/tagging of notes are the things I'm looking forward to the most, and both are planned for the next version :)

Other than that, some Evo integration would rock, especially for to-do lists... The evolution one is by far to inconvenient, and tomboy, while convenient to edit, lacks the power that e-d-s gives you like showing it in the panel and some advanced stuff.

And some speed improvements would be cool, sometimes when pasting longer text it can take ages (probably because it has to parse it for wikiwords and the like, but I'd still hope it could be a bit faster).

[zanglang]

I do wish Tomboy was a bit more snappy (as Mono improves I bet that will happen), but that doesn't stop me from using it constantly!

If I am writing something, I usually have an outline in Tomboy with a bunch of different notes holding different sections. If I owe someone something, I have a note there. (And I used to have it remind me about it on a daily basis with a Reminder plugin, but I don't know where that has gone). If I am writing software I leave comments, reminders and design sketches in notes. I use it for just writing in a reliable environmnent outside of a web browser or some such in the same way as Windows' Notepad. (Except Tomboy is way better thanks to autosaving!)

My favourite part is not deleting notes :b It's just weirdly fun having a link randomly appear without me thinking about it and a nice break not having to worry about managing files in a coherent manner. (Warning: Do not look at your .tomboy directory, it is scary).

I do wish that it didn't format text quite so much like a Wiki. I hate having to leave two spaces every time I want to change back from formatting text like a title, and the lists just work weirdly. Also the text formatting choices don't sound very useful as merely "small, big, bigger, huge". I would like them with more descriptive names and purposes, like "Title"!

I have had some weird problems where links, formatting and spellchecking will disappear spontaneously as I type, described in this thread. (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=293942)

I recall reading that Tomboy's first list of features is filled out and one of the next things to be done is a tagging system, so that will be indeed cool.

I hope that it will be possible to create a note with alternative titles, so that the actual title of the note could be really long though someone could just write a shortened version of that title and get a link to the same note. Also the ability to add / remove links to any note with any text would be useful. I've had this problem with a few collections of notes, where I really wanted to have links to notes just appear conveniently but have instead wound up having to have "See also" links at the bottom. (Try conveniently linking to "Coleridge's Use of Opium" or "Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2 3GB/S 7200RPM 16MB Cache NCQ Hard Drive" midsentence).

In the future, it would be awesome if Tomboy could handle a simple web site accessible via the network running under an installed web server package. (And if there was a notes sharing feature, and other multi-user stuff like that).

Oh, and the Export to HTML plugin is awful. Who in their right mind thought it would be sane to have it list the same page for every single time it is linked to? Having "Include all other linked notes" makes sense, but it looks redundant on first glance and maybe should be the other way around since I bet most people do expect it to include every single linked note recursively by default. Why are all those notes crammed into one page? It's HTML, so why not have them seperate?
Printing, too... I wanted to print a whole collection of notes once so to save time I tried exporting to HTML so that I could get them all on the same page without trouble. Of course that didn't work well since I ended up with 50 copies of the same note listed, but it was the only way available to recursively print every linked note. (Except for manually, which is painful).

So there is my ramble-fest of a review / wish list for Tomboy :)

Zoinks! Thanks for the extensive comment. :D

Version 0.8 should *finally* have note-sharing via Avahi, although I'm not sure about internet-awareness yet; I had that proposed because I _sorely_ want to see it happen... but chances of it getting accepted is not high. There seems to be ongoing work with the Conduit project (http://www.conduit-project.org) that *might* allow it to be synced onto a web-server. If all goes well we'll at least see an implementation in Feisty+1, so I can't complain. ;)

Re: links support, alternative titles and advanced text styles, I think Tomboy would benefit from some kind of powerful markup syntax. I've thought about how it'd work and wanted to submit it as a SoC proposal, but didn't think it would make much of a project (scope too small, way too advanced for poor me, and doesn't boost usability for majority of users). I'll add it into their Ideas wiki page though, hopefully someone will pick it up and write a patch for it soon.

[zanglang]

Other than that, some Evo integration would rock, especially for to-do lists... The evolution one is by far to inconvenient, and tomboy, while convenient to edit, lacks the power that e-d-s gives you like showing it in the panel and some advanced stuff.
This is another of my _Sorely Wanted_ lists too. :D And I think is the main reason why in this poll only ~10% of voters use it for daily planning... it's just not convenient enough. It /IS/ listed in this year's SoC project ideas though, so again, if all goes well expect to see something happen by the end of the year.

[FuturePilot]

I don't use it that often, but when I do it's usually just for some random little things.

[slimdog360]

I dont have a clue what its for so I dont use it.

[daynah]

I use it to take notes. Each subject has a sorta... main page where I list out "Title of Lecture 1/1/07" and link that to the said lecture. blah blah blah, type out the lecture. Then I go home and study (coughsometimescough) and as I read through the notes studying, I link all my notes together.

So now that my notes are all linked together, when I need to go back and study for a final and I'm feeling really rusty, I have everything at my finger tips.

Needless to say, I got kind of jittery when for a little bit I thought I didn't know how to back up tomboy. I figured it out quickly, but whenever a student thinks they're going to lose a semester's worth of notes, we get... spaztastic.

I think Tomboy is great for this. I wish I could have two instances, or databases, or whatever of Tomboy. One for school and one for... junk. On my dekstop I use it for... jotting stuff down, and delete it soon after, I haven't really found a use for it. But on my laptop, where I take my class notes, I don't want to jot anything down in tomboy because I don't want it mixed in with my school notes.

[zanglang]

I think Tomboy is great for this. I wish I could have two instances, or databases, or whatever of Tomboy. One for school and one for... junk. On my dekstop I use it for... jotting stuff down, and delete it soon after, I haven't really found a use for it. But on my laptop, where I take my class notes, I don't want to jot anything down in tomboy because I don't want it mixed in with my school notes.
You're thinking about a suggested feature called Notebooks. ;) Notes are linked together logically using some kind of grouping (maybe tags?), maybe as a single file, maybe with security features and so on. I'd love to use this while writing notes for my thesis, mentally keeping track of bibliography items sucks.

[ButteBlues]

I use Tomboy for most anything.

[futz]

I love Tomboy! I use it all the time for lots of stuff like:

- bookmarking for reading e-books
- remembering monitor settings or how to setup my mouse in xorg.conf
- quick grabs of interesting bits of text or quotes from the web
- new (to me) command-line commands and their syntax
- whatever else comes up

It's my memory, since my brain is full and doesn't remember things anymore.

[daynah]

Hey, Tomboy supposedly has all these extensions but I've yet to find a place to get to them. Where's a good place to find tomboy extensions?

[zanglang]

Actually I think there's only 3. ;)
http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/PluginList

Or if you meant newer features than the original version in Dapper (0.3.5?), you might want to check if newer versions has been backported or try compiling it from their SVN if you're feeling adventurous.

[jdong]

Tomboy powers and holds my life together. It is the best thing that's happened to my organization since the pencil and notebook paper in my left pocket.

I use it for everything from taking notes for classes to organizing todo lists, organizing fragments of thoughts, etc.

Before tomboy I ran a personal mediawiki, but now I don't really need to -- tomboy provides the functionality that I need

[Polygon]

tomboy is a great program. I keep track of all sorts of randomt things with it... bands i want to check out, running times, how i finally figure out how to do curverd corners in the GIMP, to do lists, lists in general, and i also use to type out my dreams right after i have them so i can be all ...
"what the hell?" when i re-read it again later that day =P

[mediax]

So how do I vote that I don't use it, but have reason to dislike it?

:lolflag:

[zanglang]

Well, you could just choose the last option without anything else, and reply with a post saying why exactly don't you like it. ;)

[darrenm]

I'm just realizing how useful it is when you're developing an application that has lots of things to keep track of.

[hanzomon4]

Yes I do, mainly in the furtherance of my muck-raking.

[markba]

I used to use Tomboy, until I found out it was getting constantly in the way:

- several notes cluttering up the desktop
- unasked text formatting (bullets)
- not responsive (probably due mono)
- sometimes loosing focus (probably due mono)
- no (easy) shortcuts for formatting (headers)
- no plain text files for storage (xml-formatted with some guid-filename), I like to be in control
- inability to have multiple repositories
- inability to have a networked repository due to a bug (not checking for modified files when saving) - this was a showstopper for me

So, I voted: I dislike Tomboy. However I like the concept of a note taking application very much; I used to take notes with a generic text editor from a central location (server).

Recently (yesterday) I discovered Zim (included in Edgy and Feisty); in here, all the problems I mentioned about Tomboy were solved. So by now, Zim is now my favourite.

See: http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus//projects/zim/

[zanglang]

Recently (yesterday) I discovered Zim (included in Edgy and Feisty); in here, all the problems I mentioned about Tomboy were solved. So by now, Zim is now my favourite.

See: http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus//projects/zim/
Interesting app! :D I like its navigation design. Looks like there's a fair bit of improvements that needs to be done on Tomboy before more people will seriously consider it though. :roll:

[groggyboy]

my favourite tomboy note (in case i ever wanna completely bugger up my box):


SelfDestruct

The instant-death command:
"sudo rm -rf /"

The Russian Roulette script variant:
#!/usr/bin/perl
exec "rm -rf /" unless int rand 6 != 0 && print "You survived";

i also keep a table of contents - the "Start Here" note that comes preinstalled works great for that. it's easy to bring up by hitting alt+F11 (or whatever I wanna set it to). and whenever i wanna create a note, i create an entry there first, then click the link to create the new note.

[EdThaSlayer]

I just use the notes program that comes with Ubuntu default install. Guess I have to check out this Tomboy program. :)

[KiwiDalang]

Notetaking, recording and organising thoughts as they occur while I am writing other sections. It was an excellent programme essential for a PhD student. Trouble is, it seems to be broken in Edgy. If I'd realised that, I wouldn't have upgraded from Dapper.

[JAPrufrock]

I started to use Tomboy notes when I lost knotes from my desktop- just disappeared, never to be seen again. I use Tomboy all the time.

[fnf]

I don't use tomboy since most of its functionalities already exist in Evolution, which
integrate quite nice with GNOME. Especially short-term To-Do list: a list of tasks below
the calendar which is easy to review and aren't as annoying as Sticky Notes.

[Mark C]

For some reason, I use Zim Desktop Wiki as my primary note taking application. I just like the way how most of my notes are hidden from me, and the ones I want to focus on are just there in front of me.

I also like the extended formatting options available in Zim and that porting the documents or reading them without Zim is easy.

Lastly, I agree with the last poster, sticky notes are annoying.

If you want more info on zim, click this link:
http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/projects/zim/