George Slavov's Blog

For the past few days I’ve been hacking on Tomboy. For those of you who don’t know, Tomboy is a note-taking application from the land of Linux. It’s extremely well done because it has a very minimalist user interface and does exactly what it advertises. I just press Ctrl + Shift + N, and a new note appears on my screen. I type whatever I have to jot down and then close the window. There is no need to press save or to say where you want the note to be stored. That’s what the program is for. There are tons of really nice features that you don’t even notice at first. I highly recommend it for people who are looking for something like this.

It was written using Mono C# and was, for the most part, gracefully ported over to Windows. However, the UI toolkit it uses is GTK+, which I have found to be very subtly broken on Windows, with bugs that are difficult to reproduce. I’ll just give one example. Tomboy has a tray icon which you can click on, and a menu pops up with a list of your recent notes. If you decide against opening any notes, you might want to click elsewhere on the screen to make the menu go away. You’ll be out of luck though. It won’t go away. This bug was reported to the GTK+ team in November 2006, and it’s still not fixed.

Thankfully, a knowledgeable figure by the name of Raphaël Godart found a way to work around this bug. I tested his patch yesterday, debugged a couple of issues with it, and turned it back in to the Tomboy team. Hopefully it will be included in the next stable release. I, however, can take advantage of the patch straight away, which is awesome.

One last cool thing about Tomboy.

What you see here is a note where I have typed a bit of math. You input it by writing LaTeX code surrounded by \[  \], and when you move away from the code, Tomboy automagically turns the code into a picture. Placing the cursor over the picture turns it back into code for you to modify. It took a bit of effort on my part to get this addin to work on Windows. I hope to finish it up and send my work back to the author, so others can use this.

I used to take notes in math class using LaTeX. At the end of one semester of class, I had 39 pages of notes in a pdf file. Having the notes in Tomboy would have been much cooler though. And more organized.