When it comes to keeping notes in a tidy and organized fashion on your computer, you've got your pick of dozens of programs -- most of which involve a tree-view layout, into which you're expected to tuck everything neatly away.
NBMM, on the other hand, is for people who like to keep their mess splattered all across the screen right where they can see it.
And it's for me.
Mostly me, actually...
...which is also why it's somewhat idiosyncratic. But someone else may like it anyway. So here.
This program was written to help me write novels, which may explain a few things. It's called Notebox, and for that matter Mismanager, on the grounds that my basic unit of order is the mess, which for the sake of tidiness I keep in a box. When I come across some new information of interest or utility, I make a note of it and add the note to the box. Sometimes I put the box in order. Sometimes I sort it into categorized boxes. Mostly I don't. This is all only approximately true.
Disclaimer: Notebox Mismanager is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. This program was written for my own purposes, is a work in progress, contains suboptimal and ugly code, doubtless has bugs, and certainly has a number of idiosyncrasies.
Starting Notebox Mismanager can be as simple as double-clicking it in Konqueror . . .
...but oh, what that ellipsis can encompass. Over there in Windows land, if you -- for example -- try to run a Visual Basic program without having the Visual Basic Runtime Library installed, you'll get a dialog box to tell you what's going on, if only in as cryptic a form as "unable to load msvbr60.dll". Sadly, Notebox Mismanager relies on the Kylix Runtime Library to display dialog boxes, and if its the Kylix Runtime Library that's the problem, you'll get, well, nothing.
In the event of that you get nothing by double-clicking (as opposed to seeing a little text box appear momentarily on the screen, which means NBMM has found what it needs; look at the top of your screen for a little blue icon floating atop everything else), just start NBMM in a console window --
$Mismanager
-- to check for certain basic error messages. For example, you might end up with something like this:
Mismanager: if you see a message complaining about AnsiStrings it`s because the
runtime library file (libborqt-6.9.0-qt2.3.so) couldn`t be found.
Mismanager: symbol lookup error: Mismanager: undefined symbol: initPAnsiStrings
...which means that either you don't have the runtime file -- in which case you need to go back and get it -- or it isn't installed properly. Once you know you have it, make a note of where it is, then read on.
NBMM can be started with fancy command-line startup options:
$Mismanager -lib="/home/me/mylibs" -font="times new roman" -size=12 -ns fred.nbx
(Which is all one line, by the way, if it's wrapping...)
'-lib=' lets you specify the pathname for the Runtime Library file. The example above shows NBMM being told it's in a folder called "mylibs" in my home directory (/home/me). [Aside: this example used to use ~, standard shorthand for the user's home directory, but this turned out not to work consistently.] If you happen to know that the library file in, say, /usr/lib/kylix, but NBMM isn't finding it for some reason, you would specify -lib="/usr/lib/kylix", and that should pick it up.
Under KDE, NBMM uses the font defined as 'General' in the Fonts section of the Control Center. If you're not using KDE, or something else goes awry, you can at least partially override the font you are in fact getting with the '-font=' switch. Oh dear, here comes a particularly technical bit...
== Begin Particularly Technical Bit ==
Kylix is rather touchy about fonts. If the fonts are not set up in exactly the right way, Kylix won't acknowledge their existence.
If you suffer from fonts that Kylix can't see, here is how to set them up in exactly the right way, in a tragically techie manner:
1) log in as root
2) navigate to the problematic font directory
3) type in the following IN THIS ORDER:
/usr/bin/X11/mkfontscale .
/usr/bin/X11/mkfontdir .
/usr/bin/X11/fc-cache .
ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/encodings/encodings.dir ./encodings.dir
Linux being Linux, you'll need to double-check the locations given. encodings.dir is in the location given in Slackware and Debian, but other distributions can and do put it elsewhere, in which case you'll have to find it yourself; furthermore, in Debian the mkfont* and fc-cache commands are in /usr/bin rather than /usr/bin/X11.
The forthcoming Qt4 version of Mismanager will not require these machinations, thank goodness.
== End Particularly Technical Bit ==
You can override the standard size with the '-size=' switch.
In practice the top level of the main menu will get drawn according to Kylix's whim, and I see that I neglected to scale the note grid to cope with extra-large fonts, but what the hey.
The '-ns' switch prevents the Kylix "GNU Public License" splash screen from appearing.
There is also a new '-basecolor=rrggbb' startup switch that lets you set the standard color for the application (buttons and backgrounds and such). rr gg and bb are hex digits. -basecolor=eeeedd (or -basecolor=EEEEDD) looks quite nice...
Having gotten NBMM up and running, you should see, if your window manager works like KDE's, a little blue and white icon, looking a bit like a crosshair display, floating around loose. This icon is intended to resemble the main program window. If you double-click said icon the main program window will appear. Double-click the icon again and the main program window will disappear. Click-and-hold on the icon and you should be able to drag it around the screen and leave it somewhere comfortably out of the way -- I keep it next to the minimize button of maximized windows. (It was intended to reside in the system tray, but I became used to having it float around.) The icon, incidentally, should turn red when a change has been made to the notebox and back to blue when the notebox is saved.
...is a typical title bar. It displays the name of the program when there's no notebox loaded, or the name of the notebox that's loaded when there is.
The File Menu contains two Opens, two Reopens, three flavora of Import, four (one more than in the beta++ version) Saves, two Exports, Mark as Unchanged, Close and Exit.
Open Notebox and Open Exploded Notebox allow one to open and save notebox files. Notebox files, as you again might expect, are specially formatted collections of text snippets (i.e., notes). A significant feature of the special formatting allows categorizing of notes; these categories are displayed in columnar, or spreadsheet, format. The purpose of exploded noteboxes -- that's "exploded" as in "exploded diagram" -- is to allow relatively easy use of noteboxed information in conjunction with other programs. Exploded noteboxes consist of a small tag file (e.g. "fred.nbe") and a related folder (e.g. "fred"). The folder contains the same data that an .nbx file would, disintegrated into a simple hierarchy of folders and files. Each notebox category is represented by a folder; each note in a given category is stored as a plain text (.txt) file accompanied, if need be, by an options (.opt) file containing some internal Notebox data related to that note. All the folders and files are given names derived from their contents, so you should easily be able to use other programs to edit your noteboxed notes, although since I don't control how other programs work I can't make promises.
User beware: breaking noteboxes into folders and files in this way can cause disk storage space requirements to skyrocket.
Reopen is for (relatively) easy reopening of whatever notebox file you were working with when you last exited Notebox Disorganizer. This menu item is dimmed under various obvious circumstances. (You can automate the process by going to Tools|Set Preferences and checking the "Auto Reopen Last Loaded" option.) NBMM also keeps a list of the last thirty noteboxes opened, which you can get at by way of Reopen From History; it should, but as of the current release doesn't, purge no-longer-valid filenames.
Append Notebox will allow you to add the contents of another notebox to the current one. The imported notes will be added to the right of the existing ones.
The Import Text Files function will allow you to load batches of plain text (.txt) files. You may have a reason to do this. The files are limited in size to 65,535 characters at most; larger files will be split into multiple notes. This limitation is something of a leftover from the Windows version of this program, and may go away in the future.
Note: since Kylix provides no immediately obvious filetype-sorting and exclusion capabilities for this dialog, you will actually be shown and allowed to open files whether they're plain-text or not. Exercise caution.
Import Text Files As Links is an experimental modification of Import Text Files, which adds only the pathnames of the files to the notebox -- the actual content of the files is loaded only on an as-needed basis, i.e. for editing or searching. NBMM keeps track of the last-written-time of linked files and reloads them if that time has changed, so your displays and Find results should always be correct -- barring the usual fiascos -- even if you update your linked files in some other program while NBMM is running unless you update said linked file while editing it in NBMM. In that circumstance the change will go unnoticed and the file will be overwritten by NBMM upon exiting the editor (which is when changes are written to disk). If a given file can't be written, NBMM will note this and attempt to write the linked file again whenever the notebox itself is next saved -- so there's your opportunity to correct those faulty Read-Only attributes. If that next save happens to be the one made upon exiting NBMM, and the problem hasn't been corrected, your changes will be lost forever with (as the role-playing-gamers say) no saving throw. Note also that a failure to write a linked file is not considered a failure to save the notebox itself. Maybe it should be.
Save Notebox will save the current notebox in its current format (normal or exploded).
Save Notebox As allows saving the contents of the current notebox under a new name in normal and exploded formats.
The next three options are new or different or rearranged or renamed in this release of NBMM:
Save Outbox As Notebox saves everything in the Outbox to a new notebox, after which you could destroy the contents of the Outbox (select Shred from the Outbox menu) or not as you see fit. (Read the rest of these notes for further explication of the Outbox.)
Save Class As Notebox is like Save Outbox As Notebox only...different. (I note that I have failed to provide a Shred Class function. Ah well, I haven't gotten any complaints...)
The Export Notebox and Export Outbox functions allow the saving of, well, what you might expect, as single files. Select this option and you'll get a dialog offering Plain Text, Fancy Text and HTML options. The particulars of Fancy Text and HTML output are set through the Export Options tab of the Preferences dialog; for a short discussion of the possibilities see the Tools menu entry below.
Mark As Unchanged allows you to avoid having the next auto-save occur, in the event that you accidentally deleted or mangled something you didn't intend to delete or mangle. It's a poor compensation for operations that aren't undoable -- particularly poor if you're using the immediate autosave option. (Hey, quality programmers! Steal this project! Do it properly!)
Close is what you choose for a tabula rasa.
Exit will.
The Editor menu...
...which probably ought to be just Edit, but I'm lazy and didn't want to go to the bother of customizing the Edit menu for either the note grid or the note editor, whichever happened to be active at the time...
...contains Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find, Exchange For Scratchpad, Load From and Save To, Mark Unchanged and Discard All Changes.
Cut, Copy and Paste work as you might expect, and Select All does.
The Find function is a bit more useful than some Finds you may have found, although some people may find it irritating. Let's have a look at the dialog.
First, two edit boxes at the upper left -- full marks if you guessed that these are the text-to-find box and the text-to-replace-with box -- then below that, two sets of buttons classified into Editor and Note Grid respectively, a Close button, and finally a box of Find Options.
Editor:
-------
Find Down searches for the text-to-find from the cursor down. Replace Down does a Find Down and then replaces t-t-f with text-to-replace-with.
Find All finds all the lines in which t-t-f occurs, and displays them as a list in the Found Lines department of the Editor Navigator. Clicking in that list will take you straight to the appropriate line. (Find All was rather tricky to implement, and if it malfunctions you can blame Borland and Trolltech. :) )
Replace All replaces every occurence of t-t-f with t-t-r-w.
Find From Top just puts the cursor at the top of the editor and does a Find Down. Strangely, there is no Replace From Top. So much for symmetry.
Replace In Selection is like Replace All but confined to the current selection. Strangely, there is no Find In Selection. Maybe the Find dialog needs to be bigger...
See also Find Options, further on.
Note Grid:
----------
Find Notes will find every occurrence of the t-t-f in the entire notebox and display the matching notes in the Found Notes section of the Grid Navigator.
Find Notes In is the same but first provides a dialog allowing you to specify which categories to search.
See also Find Options, further on.
The Close button closes the Find window -- as will pressing Escape, and, for that matter, Control-F.
Find Options:
-------------
Found to the right of the Find dialog, these control...well, the find options.
Match Case, if checked, makes CaPiTaLiZaTiOn significant.
Whole Words, if checked, means that find won't find the 'in' in 'find', if you're doing a find on 'in', and so on.
The Swap Find And Replace button swaps the t-t-f and t-t-r-w. This was added for testing purposes, but someone else may find it handy.
Bounded Find Notes/All only applies to the Find Notes and Find All buttons and is therefore a "limited option". It breaks the t-t-f apart rather like those 'search engines' do on that crazy 'internet' thing. Each word or "phrase in quotes" in the text-to-find box will be found separately. E.G., if you turn on Bounded Find, enter
Tom Dick "Harry Zell"
in the find box, and click Find Notes, Find will break the entry into "Tom" "Dick" and "Harry Zell", and return only those notes that contain all three names. Clicking Find All, on the other hand, will list all the lines in the editor containing any of those names. This made sense at the time but now seems inconsistent to me. Possibly it should list only those lines containing ALL of those names. Possibly there should be some option to find notes containing ANY of those names. Well, you can't have everything.
Checking the Use CR substitute box will tell Find to treat any occurences of the specified character ("~" by default) in the find- or replace- texts as a carriage return, thus allowing you to find and/or replace returns should you wish to do so.
At the bottom of the Find box is a status line that will tell you whether or not it managed to find anything, and how long it took if it did. If you used the CR substitute option this will look bad. Shame on me.
Back to the Editor menu...
Mark Unchanged will mark the editor as unchanged. Abandon editing!
Discard All Changes will. As the editor was when you first entered it and started typing, so shall it be again. The difference between these is that Mark Unchanged is for people who want to exit the editor after some ill-advised edits, while Discard All Changes is for those who wish to stay in the editor after some ill-advised edits.
Thus ends the Editor menu. Note that the Editor menu does not list Undo. This is because I never noticed it missing. After noticing that I hadn't noticed it, I decided to add it, and then forgot about it for six months, and I promised to release this version today, 30 Sep 2005. Thus it's still not there. But the Editor's pop-up menu has Undo, and Control-Z works. You are strong, and will endure.
The Note Menu contains Cut, Copy, three flavors of Paste for those of you who have fond memories of kindergarten, the same Find as in the Editor menu, Set Goal, Launch, Bookmark, Outbox, Classify Note, Broadcast, Receive, Sync, Colorize and CC: Editor Scratchpad.
Cut and Copy will respectively cut and copy a note. The note will retain any special status that has been given to it (see below).
Paste Overwrite will overwrite the current note with the contents of the clipboard. Paste Insert creates a new note from the contents of the clipboard and shoves all the existing notes down a slot to make room for it. Paste Append adds the text on the clipboard to the end of the current note -- if there's room for it. As mentioned elsewhere, there's a 65,535 character limit on the size of any given note. There's a Windows 95 reason for this, so this limitation may disappear on Linux at some point.
Find is the same Find described in the entry for the Editor menu. Possibly it shouldn't be. Maybe the Find, Find Lines, Replace and Replace All buttons should be disabled when the Editor is not active. What do you think?
Set Goal is part of a suboptimal attempt to make Mismanager more useful while participating in National Novel Writing Month. Select this option and you'll get a dialog box asking for a goal, which is to the say the number of words you think this note should end up containing (e.g. 250 = one standard manuscript page). Having filled that out, you'd go to the View menu and use the option to Prefer Goals To Actual Counts. With that enabled, the word count for this note would display how many words you have yet to write to meet your goal -- e.g. "G-~250 words" -- or how by many words the goal has been exceeded -- e.g. "G+~250 words".
Adding the letter C to the end of the number -- e.g. 250C -- will set that goal for every note in the category.
Set the goal to 0 to cancel the effect.
Launch will -- provided that the note seems to be something launchable, i.e. starts with http://, file://, and most other internet-style prefixes -- hand the contents of the current note to the program specified for such purposes in the Configuration section of NBMM (see Tools|Set Preferences) and say "execute this".
Bookmark will set or clear the current note's Bookmark status, which simply means that the current note will or will not be listed in the Bookmarks display in the Grid Box, which sits to the right of the Grid and is described elsewhere.
Outbox will set or clear the current note's Outbox status, which simply means that the current note will or will not be listed in the Outbox display in the Grid Navigator, described elsewhere.
Classify Note will set or clear the current note's Class status, which simply means that the current note will or will not be listed in the appropriate Class display in the Grid Navigator, described elsewhere.
Broadcast and Receive are designed to allow a single note to appear in more than one place in the notebox.
Should you want to do this, just click on the note you want to see multiple copies of and select Note|Broadcast. After that, click on a different note and select Note|Receive. You'll see a list of broadcasters. Choose the one you want and the selected broadcasting note will appear in place of the receiving note. (The previous contents will not be affected. When you want to stop receiving and work with said previous contents again, just select Note|Receive again; the original note will reappear unharmed.)
Broadcasting status is indicated by a leftward-pointing chevron («) in the grid; receiving, by a rightward-pointing chevron (»). This of course assumes that the font being used to draw the note grid has such characters in it, which is an interesting problem.
Importing noteboxes with broadcasting or receiving notes should work properly.
At the moment if you turn off the Broadcaster all the notes that are Receiving it will get turned off as well -- they'll show up as '»broken connection'. I should do something about this. Complain!
If you copy a Broadcaster and then paste it, you'll get two independent Broadcasters. This may be bad design. Possibly you should you get a Receiver instead. You tell me.
Sync should maybe be called AutoCopy. You link notes in much the same way as with Broadcast and Receive, but instead of having phantom copies of a given note you'll end up with actual physical copies. Change one and the changes will be autocopied to all the others in a breathtaking display of, yes, synchronization.
You can set a note as sync-enabled with Note|SynchroNote|Add to/Remove from Sync List...or press F11, which seems to be the preferred method.
You can create a synchronized copy of a note with Note|SynchroNote|Sync With...-- or you can just paste a copy of it, which seems to be the preferred method.
Danger, Will Robinson! What do you think fiddling with synchronized notes outside of Notebox Disorganizer -- such as when working with a copy of an exploded notebox on a PDA, or if you decide to load an .nbx file using a text editor -- will get you? Confusion, that's what. So don't. I should probably take a stab at compensating for this, at the cost of code bloat, but as yet have not.
As an aside, 'sync' always rhymes with 'sink'. On the other hand, 'synch' rhymes with 'cinch' half the time.
Colorize will pop up options to set the text and background colors of the current note as displayed in the grid (not necessarily in the editor; that can be set independently in the View menu).
This is a somewhat useless feature intended as a reminder to the author to implement some type of note color-coding.
Notes with special status (e.g. bookmarked notes) have special coloring that will override any colors you set here.
CC: Editor Scratchpad copies the note to the editor scratchpad, which lives in the Editor Navigator. Presumably at some point you'll want to make some edits without altering the original...
The Category Menu contains Name, Set Goal, Insert/Insert Multiple, Delete/Destroy, Add to/Remove from Outbox as Category, Add To Outbox As Individual Notes, Remove Category's notes from Outbox, Insert Blank Notes, Delete Blank Notes, and Save As Text File.
Name Category allows you to name -- or rename, as appropriate -- the current category.
Set Goal is similar to the Note menu's Set Goal, except that it sets a goal for the entire category, and the C modifier makes the specified number of words apply to each category in the notebox.
Insert will insert a new blank category column at the current position, shoving categories rightward as necessary. Hold the Shift key down while clicking the Category menu item and Insert will become Insert multiple, should you happen to want more than one. There's a current limit of 1,000 categories.
The next item will appear either as Destroy (if the category has at least one note) or Delete (if it doesn't). There is as yet no Undo available, so be careful. (See, there IS a reason for File|Mark As Unchanged.)
Add to Outbox as Category will add the category to the outbox as a unit, as opposed to Add...As Individual Notes, which will add all the notes in the category individually. Adding the category as a unit is currently how you extract an arbitrary selection of categories to a new notebox file, in conjunction with the File|Export Outbox function -- a bit daft, I now think, but it made sense at the time. Individual notes in the Outbox will be exported gathered into a new, separate category ("Outboxed Notes", as I recall).
If the category is already in the Outbox, "Add to" will become "Remove from", so that you may remove the category as a unit. The As Individual Notes option could have a similar complement, but I went with Remove Category's Notes From Outbox instead.
Insert Blank Notes will, of course, insert blank notes. You may have a reason. Delete Blank Notes, which was once called Defragment, will close up the blank-note gaps in the category.
Note: blank notes at the bottoms of categories, that is, the kind that have no non-blank notes beneath them, are removed every time the notebox is saved.
Use Save As Text File to saves all the notes in the category as a single file.
The Outbox Menu contains Inbox (clear) The Outbox, Shred The Outbox, Add Grid Navigator Contents To The Outbox, Copy The Outbox Here, Move The Outbox Here, Move The Outbox To A Category, Move The Outbox To A New Category, Outboxed Notes -> Synchronotes, Desync Outboxed Notes, Classify The Outbox and Colorize The Outbox.
Inbox (clear) The Outbox does exactly that. It doesn't delete notes, just removes their in-the-outbox setting.
Shred The Outbox, on the other hand, deletes all the notes in the Outbox. There's no undo, so be careful.
Add Grid Navigator Contents To The Outbox -- if you want to, for example, put all the current Found Notes into the Outbox, this is what you'd use (after setting the Grid Navigator to Found Notes). You can click, shift-click, and click-and-drag in the Navigator to establish a selection in the event that you don't want the entire contents. This is not keyboard-friendly, come to notice it...
Copy The Outbox Here and Move The Outbox Here should be self-explanatory; ditto Move The Outbox To A Category and Move The Outbox To A New Category (the latter two pop up appropriate dialogs for the purpose). Hmm, why no Copy Outbox to (new) Category? I never needed it, and no one ever asked for it.
Outboxed Notes -> Synchronotes turns all the notes in the outbox into Synchronized Notes, in the event you have a whole bunch of notes you want to show up in multiple categories -- Desync Outboxed Notes being somewhat complementary. You can use Grid Navigator To Outbox to put all (or just some of) the synchronized notes into the Outbox.
Classify The Outbox will set all the notes in the Outbox to the specified classification.
Colorize The Outbox will set all the notes in the Outbox to the specified colors. Useless, but maybe pretty...
The Pop Menu is for quick keyboard-oriented navigation, as a substitute for using the grid navigator. Here you can invoke popup lists of categories, bookmarks, the contents of the outbox, found notes, broadcasting notes, receiving notes, and synchronotes.
I noted recently that there is an aberration in this dialog's alphabetical listing of its contents, namely that it sorts entries in the format "A-Z, a-z," rather than "Aa-Zz", as other alphabetically sorted listings in Mismanager do. This results from a design decision by Borland, and I expect to fix it/work around it at some point. No one complained...
The Tools Menu contains Display Notebox Statistics, Display Debug Messages, Clear Debug Messages, Tray Menu, Pin This Note, Go To Pinned, Transfer Class To Category, Create Class Image Here From, Rearrange Categories, Rearrange Notes In Present Category, Edit Category Names, Edit Row Labels, Edit Keywords, Edit Boilerplate, and Set Preferences.
Display Notebox Statistics shows a summary of the current notebox -- number of notes, total size, word count...and anything else I may have thought to add.
Show Debug Messages frequently shows nothing of interest. If you're in the process of helping me debug ND it may show a great deal of nothing of interest, at which point Clear Debug Messages may come in handy.
Tray Menu is an alternative to right-clicking the floating NBMM icon.
Pin This Note and Go To Pinned are a complementary pair that are functionally similar to Bookmarking, only a bit quicker and more limited. Do a Pin Note and the current note will become pinned, which means that invoking Go To Pinned will take you back to it from elsewhere in the grid.
Transfer Class To Category: there are four classes (initially called 1, 2, 3 and 4) to which notes can be added. Add some notes to class 1, select Tools|Transfer|Class 1, and a category-to-transfer-to dialog will appear.
Create Class Image Here From...: select Tools|Create...|Class 1, and a phantom copy of all the notes in Class 1 will appear in the current category. Editing an image of a note is the same as editing the note itself; deleting the image has no effect on the original. I hope.
Rearrange Categories and Rearrange Notes In Present Category will pop up dialogs that will allow you to rearrange the order of categories in the notebox and the order of notes in the current category, respectively. You can select the items to move with a mouse click-and-drag or Shift-Up and Shift-Down on the keyboard, and then move the selection up and down either by clicking the Up and Down buttons -- or by pressing Ctrl-Up and Ctrl-Down on the keyboard, which is much faster. There may be some ugliness in the dialog's display while moving things; try maximizing the dialog's window.
Edit Category Names, Edit Row Labels, Edit Keywords and Edit Boilerplate all pop up mini-editors that will let you change the related information:
Row Labels, if you create them with Edit Row Labels, will display in the grid alongside the row numbers.
Category names can be changed en masse with the Edit Category names function. If you delete lines from the minieditor, you'll find that your rightmost categories now have names that are some variation on "Untitled". If you add lines to the minieditor, you'll find that your rightmost categories are a) new, b) blank, and c) given less than interesting names. All things considered, this function is functional at best.
The use of Keywords and Boilerplate text will be discussed in depth elsewhere, I hope.
Set Preferences displays a Preferences dialog as commonly seen in "computer programs". Five tabbed pages are available; let's run through them...
Miscellaneous Tab --
To the left there are six checkboxes:
1. Find editor's selected text: if you want said text to be auto-inserted in the Find dialog for some reason.
2. Count categories from zero: you'll note that the categories are numbered, much as the rows are. I had a request that they should be countable from 0, hence this checkbox. No request for counting rows from 0, so no checkbox for that.
3. Ins implies Edit (swap Ins/Ctrl-Ins): normally, if you press the Ins key while in the grid a new blank note will be inserted at the current ("cursor", active note, whichever) position, pushing notes out of the way to make room for it; if you press Ctrl-Ins, you'll insert a note and be dropped into the Editor. Checking this box will invert the normal behavior.
4. Make .bak-ups of loaded files: if you check this box and then load "fred.nbx", ND will make a copy of "fred.nbx" as "fred.nbx.bak". Any existing "fred.nbx.bak" will be destroyed. If your file is located on /mnt/floppy this will not happen. /mnt/fd0 -- that's different, and I should probably add a check that.
5. Auto Reopen Last Loaded: keeps track of the file that you were working on and saves its name when you exit, and then automatically reopens it the next time you start the program.
6. Note Preview: arrows instead of mouse: in the View menu there are various Note Preview options. These are designed to let you mouse around the grid and see what's in other notes without having to exit the one you're currently editing. This checkbox causes the current note to be displayed as a preview. This is useful in case you a) are working in grid-only mode and b) hate the mouse and just want to arrow around. If you have this box checked and find yourself missing the mouse-around capacity, hold down the Ctrl key while moving the mouse pointer around the grid.
To the right is a new-to-beta+++ feature that allows you to set the method used to do word-counting. If you want to be conservative (as when writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month, or a composition for school) choose Space-Tab-Paragraph Break. The Printer's Rule method is a more line-oriented or space-oriented count, as used by editors when figuring how much room the text will occupy in print; if you were writing for publication, this would be the approximate number of words for which the editor would be paying, and is, you'll note, generally a higher number than the Space-Tab-Paragraph Break method.
Below that is the Launch command box. If you middle-click a note that appears to be launchable (e.g. one that starts with 'http://'; the text of launchable notes is drawn underlined) NBMM will try to send the contents of the note to the command listed here. I should probably allow multiple targets, so you could choose to send http://fred.com to your browser and file:///fred.mp3 to your audio player, but no one has complained.
At the bottom is the Set Editor Font button. I think this is self-explanatory, though since you can also set the font from the editor's popup menu I'm no longer sure why it's here.
If you find that the dialog that results from pressing this button is missing fonts you know are installed, either a) the fonts are in your ~/.fonts folder, the fonts in which Kylix apparently can't detect, or b) your font configuration is very subtly corrupted. Try removing and reinstalling problematic fonts.
Colors Tab --
There are several kinds of notes, the most common four being Normal, Active, Selected, and Bookmark(ed). Normal notes are those that are, well, otherwise unformatted. The Active note is the one that is currently being displayed in the editor. Selected notes are the ones that are in the Outbox. Bookmark(ed) notes are, of course, bookmarked. (Note that Bookmarked notes are displayed not only in your choice of colors but sport centered text in the grid. Just thought I'd mention it.) You can change the colors either by clicking the color swatches as indicated and using the resulting color dialog, or by entering hexadecimal color codes in the edit boxes (e.g. #000000 for black and #FFFFFF for white). (There was a reason for providing those edit boxes, but I can't remember what it was.)
Below the common four are the Classes, whose coloring options are the same as above. You can click their descriptive labels ("Class 2" and so forth) to change their names.
The Word Count colors are for the overlaid counts in the grid.
Empty notes don't have any text and technically aren't even notes, but you can change the standard color anyway.
Save Options Tab --
These are the automatic save options (the "Save named files" caption is meant to indicate that as-yet-unnamed noteboxes will not/cannot be automatically saved).
Select "Manually" if you don't want autosaving and would rather press Control-S frequently.
"After each change" causes the notebox to be saved upon making changes and then exiting the editor (editor changes are not committed until you exit the editor). This is probably the best option by some standards of safety, but I found it irritating on slow disks.
"[] seconds after last change" will start a timer upon exiting the editor instead of immediately saving. Make changes often enough and conceivably the notebox won't get saved until you exit...
...and the separate "On exit" box exists for those who have selected the manual save option but don't want to get the annoying "Do you want to save changes" dialog on exit all the time.
WARNING!
If you select the delayed-save option, it is possible for you to lose data under certain circumstances. In order to save changes on exit, Mismanager has to be notified that it's being shut down. If you always exit Mismanager manually, e.g. by File|Exit, there should be no problem. If, on the other hand, you tell your window manager to shut down, and let it handle telling all the running programs to quit, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise. In my limited experience of window managers, KDE does do what's necessary, while XFCE does not. I suggest you test for unfortunate outcomes before making use of delayed saves. (Another way to pull the plug on Mismanager is to start it from an 'xterm' command line, and then close the xterm. I discovered this by accident...)
END OF WARNING!
It may be worth mentioning at this point that ND saves .nbx files in a multistep process -- 1) the notebox is is saved under a new randomly-generated filename; 2) if the temporary file was successfully saved, the original file is deleted and 2a) the new file is renamed to the original name. On the other hand, when saving an .nbe file the process is slightly different -- 1) the master folder is renamed; 2) a new master folder is saved; if the save was successful, 3) the original folder is destroyed. In case you wondered.
Outbox Options Tab --
This contains three combo boxes:
[1a] After Duplicating the Outbox...
[1b] ...then...
and
[2] After Moving the Outbox...
These allow customizing the behavior of the Move and Duplicate functions found in the Tools menu. For instance, if you Duplicate the Outbox, should the newly duplicated notes appear in the Outbox? If they're genuine duplicates, you'd expect this to be the case, but it can be annoying. For that matter, what about the originals? Most of the time you won't want them in the Outbox after you've moved or duplicated them, but maybe not always. Configure your preferred options here -- always ask what to do, always add, never add, always remove, etc.
Below that, and new to beta+++, is the Outbox Grid Selections Automatically checkbox.
There is a new popup menu in the Note Grid, and this is related to that. Uncheck this and you'll get a popup menu every time you make a selection in the Note Grid, offering some new options, viz, Outbox, Classify, DeClassify, and Move Selection. (And Cancel.) Leave this box checked and you'll need to hold the Ctrl key down while selecting notes to get that menu.
At the bottom lie the Cancel and Update buttons. Cancel is obvious; maybe Update should be OK. I don't know. Do you know?
Export Options Tab --
This contains a number of fields you can fill out to use with the Export Notebox and Export Outbox options in the File menu (or make blank to avoid using them, whichever).
The first three boxes come into play with the Fancy Text output option, which is not all that fancy. You can insert plain-text headers before each category, and insert headers and footers before and after each note. The text can be just about anything you like (tragically, special formatting characters like linefeeds and tabs and such are not yet available); some special keywords are also available, viz, [CATNUMBER], [NOTENUMBER], and [WORDS]. If your categories are chapters, you could use "Chapter [CATNUMBER]" as the Cat(egory) Header, for example. [WORDS] inserts the wordcount of that particular note.
The HTML option includes the above, plus formatting options for Cascading Style Sheets to make the resulting page look nicer.
You can't have everything; pages produced by NBMM come in one or two-column styles, the first column being .Main and the optional second column being .Index. .Main contains all the categories and their notes, while .Index, if used, contains links to the notes (the notes in the .Main column will include linkbacks to the Index in this case). There are fields provided for the CSS of the body of the page, the .Main and .Index columns, the category headers, and the note headers, footers and bodies. There is also a box provided for additional stylesheets (you might use this for changing link colors and so forth).
If you don't want to use a given option, just make its field blank (select all the text and delete it, I mean; don't use spaces). If you want to get the default style back, enter a single period into the its field and click on (or tab to) a different field.
You'll need to read up on your HTML and CSS to get full use out of these options, although the defaults look fairly nice to me; changing basic things like colors and fonts should be easily inferrable.
Oh yes, one important note -- if the first character of the first line of a note is the alternate quote character -- ` -- that first line will displayed in the note header, with the rest of the note in the main body.
The View Menu sports a variety of display-configuring options:
Editor Only, Grid Only and Editor and Grid allow you to see almost what you'd expect. Actually, if you select Grid Only and then double-click a note (or press Enter when a note is focused) you will find yourself viewing only the Editor; if your view is Editor Only and you exit the note by pressing Escape you will find yourself viewing only the Grid. Possibly these three menu items should be streamlined to 'Divided View' and 'Undivided View'. You tell me.
Note Preview Window: select this (it will sprout a checkmark until you select it again) and you will be treated to a small floating window that will display the contents of whatever note cell the mouse pointer happens to be on.
Note Preview In Grid Navigator: select this (it will sprout a checkmark until you select it again) and the contents of the note the mouse pointer is atop will appear in place of the Grid Navigator.
(See the description of Set Preferences for a modification of the way the preview displays work.)
Navigators On Right: select this (it will sprout a checkmark until you select it again) and the Grid and Editor Navigators will, well, be drawn on the right hand of the window as in Notebox Disorganizer.
Next up are five different display options: Notebox Count..., Category Header Count..., Notes In Grid Count..., Editor Count... and Prefer Goals To Actual Count.
The Notebox Count is shown (if you choose to display it) at the lefthand side of the Status Bar under the main menu, and can display the total number of notes in the notebox, or the total number of words, or the total size in characters.
The Category Header Count is shown (if you choose to display it) at the righthand side of each category's header, and can display the number of notes, words, or characters in each category.
Notes In Grid Count controls whether all the notes display, in their upper righthand corners, their size in characters or words (or nothing at all).
Editor Count controls whether the toolbar just above the editor displays, in the box to the right of the line:column display, the size of the editor in characters, words, or lines (or nothing at all). (Note that this box also displays the "editor has been changed" status in the form of an underline beneath whatever happens to be displayed there, including nothing (which can be hard to see).)
Prefer Goals To Actual Count -- is part of a suboptimal attempt to make Mismanager more useful while participating in National Novel Writing Month. One would create a category with 30 blank notes, use the Set Goal options in the Note and Category menus to establish a category goal of 50000 words and a note goal of 1667 words, and then enable this option -- thereby changing a note word count display of, e.g., '~10 words' to 'G-~1657 words' and a display of '~2667 words' to 'G+~1000 words'. You can cancel a goal by setting it to 0.
Track Editor Cursor Position... Select this -- it will sprout a check mark until you select it again -- and when you click a note it will automatically scroll in the editor to the position where the cursor was when you edited it last.
The Color Editor BG options will allow you to set the background color of the Editor (and Editor Scratchpad) to match the background color of the note in the Grid. With some exceptions.
...is just under the Menu bar, and in a stunning feat of poor user-interface design consists of a set of what are obviously labels but which act like buttons.
At the far left is a label-button that indicates either the current number of notes, the total word count of all notes, the size in characters of all notes, or even nothing at all (if you so desire). Clicking this changes the display; right-clicking it provides a pop-up menu of all the options. (View|Notebox Count from the main menu provides roughly the same function.)
To the right of that are three more label-buttons, viz., -, 0, +. These control the vertical height of the rows in the grid. (Minus for smaller, Zero to reset, Plus for bigger. (Technically '0' could be '1', since the default is one line high.)
To the right of the sizing l-buttons is a wide one that frequently displays the current notebox file's pathname. It also displays a preview of the note that the mouse pointer is on top of, should the mouse pointer happen to be on top of a note. Should you happen to scroll grid such that the current note is no longer visible, you can click this l-button to bring said note back into view. Middle-clicking this l-button will save the current notebox file.
At the far right are three more buttons, viz., -, =, +. These control the display of sections of the main window. (Equal: show grid and editor. Minus: hide the grid. Plus: hide the editor. The View menu's Both-Editor-And-Grid, Editor-Only, and Grid-Only options provide redundant functionality.)
...displays the notes in the notebox. It sports a right-click menu that provides various useful functions, most or all of which can also be found in the Note menu, and which are (I hope) either a) documented in the Note section, or b) obvious. We achieve perfection through successive approximation.
Some notes, you may note[1], have small marks in their lower right corners. These have more text in them than can currently be shown.
Although there are buttons in the sort-of-tool-and-status-bar that will change the height of the rows in the grid, thereby allowing more text but fewer notes to be seen, there is no corresponding means to change the width of the columns. There may be a reason. Probably I'm just a rotten programmer...
...but there is a Borland-provided bug in the grid. If a note cell is only partially visible -- and I've gone to lengths to avoid drawing partial cells -- clicking on the partial section will result in out-of-control scrolling, and a mess, since the grid will think you're selecting (and thereby adding to the Outbox) all the cells that go whizzing past. The lack of column-sizing may be related to this, albeit perhaps for an obsolete reason. It's been a while. If you put the mouse pointer over a partially displayed cell the status bar at the bottom of the window will change color as a warning sign. This is pretty much the sole function of the status bar, come to notice it, but we have hopes for the future.
___________
[1] Humour
...is much like the first.
At the far left is an informative and fascinating display of the number of words in the current note (calculated using Printer's Rule, discussed elsewhere), or its size in lines or characters, or nothing at all. Click the display to change it; right-click for a pop-up menu of all options. The statistics are drawn with an underline when the contents of the editor have been changed.
To the right of the word count you will see the line:column display. Click this display and nothing will happen. Why?
To the right of line:column is a big wide bar that will tell you what cell you're editing, in the format category name : note number -- useful if you happen to scroll the grid while editing and forget where you were, I suppose, and of course if you maximize the editor. Click this display and you can change the height of the editor relative to the height of the grid. Middle-click it for a couple of preset ratios (1:3 and 2:3, I think).
And at the far right, behold! Controls that duplicate the functionality of the View menu's Show-Both, Show-Grid, Show-Editor...functions. Equals: show both; Minus: hide the editor; Plus: hide the grid. Note that - and + do the reverse of the similar buttons on the grid bar.
...is mostly like any other plain-text editor you may run across. In the event that you manage to get any "rich" text into it -- as by importing a Notebox Disorganizer file containing some -- you will see a mess as shown in the illustration.
You get into the editor by clicking in it, or double clicking on a note, or by pressing return when a note is active in the grid. You get out of the editor by clicking on the grid, or by pressing Escape. ("Arrows, Return and Escape can take you a long way..." -- Tom Weishaar)
For a list of editor key commands, see Key Commands at the end of the documentation.
Over on the left (or right, if you have View|Navigators On Right checked) you will find the Editor Navigator, which is discussed further on.
Late addendum: the Editor's contextual menu (or right-click menu, though you can also invoke it via Shift-F10) should be mostly self-explanatory, except for the Kwan Quo entry. Kwan Quo is a block-breaking tool for fiction writers; the general idea is to type as complete a description of the difficulty as possible, then select the text you've typed and invoke the Kwan Quo menu, which will insert some cryptic advice esoterically derived from your selected text. Visit http://geocities.com/goosnargh37/kwanquo-js.html for a better explication.
...normally found to the left of the grid itself, consists of a combo-box and a listbox. The pop-down combo-box controls the contents of the listbox. Current options allow easy click-and-go (gad I hope that's not a trademark) navigation between categories, bookmarked notes, notes in the Outbox, and notes found by the Find Notes function in the Find dialog.
The skinny button in between the grid and the navigator may be clicked to hide the navigator, or dragged to change their widths.
...is the thing normally to the left of the editor, the thing with a combobox at the top and a display below that, the thing that currently offers the following functions:
# Editor Preview: less handy than having multiple editing windows of a given note, but better than nothing, this allows you to zip around the contents of your note. Click on a listed line and be zapped automagically there.
# Found Lines: something of a subset of the Editor Preview; lists only those lines containing a search term from the find dialog, once you've done a Find Lines.
# Boilerplate text: After opening a given .nbx file, ND will attempt to read an accompanying .boilerplate file (e.g. Fred.nbx and Fred.boilerplate). The .boilerplate file is a simple plain-text file; each paragraph in it is listed as a separate single-line entry in the navigator. Click on such a line and it will be inserted at the cursor -- assuming there's room in the editor for it; if there isn't, you will be so informed.
# Special: Inserts the date, the time, the date and time, the time and date, or a list of numbers, at the cursor.
# Keywords: similar to a sorted boilerplate with more specific utility, this needs to be better documented.
# Notes In This Category: can be handy if you've maximized the editor.
# Editor Scratchpad: a little editor unto itself. It has, I hope, all the functionality of the editor, except that it doesn't get saved anywhere when you quit. This may be a mistake.
The skinny button in between the editor and the navigator may be clicked to hide the navigator, or dragged to resize the editor and navigator.
The grid is limited to 1000 columns.
The Notebox word count -- well, the one that isn't Space-Tab-Paragraph Break -- is actually a manuscript-oriented (ms format: Courier 12, unjustified, one-inch margins, nominally 250 words per page) "Printer's Rule" based approximate space count. It gives reasonably accurate results on those terms.
(Printer's Rule, as described by Geo. H. Scithers, famous editor: Set line length to 63 (so the average full-length line will be about 60 characters + spaces, equalling 10 "words") Set page length to 100 lines. Find the page number of the last page. Multiply that by 1,000 (100 lines/page, 10 words/line).)
Example: A hand-counted 3500 word text was estimated by my code as 3140 words, a 10% undercount. OpenOffice 1.0 estimated it as 2675 words, a 24% undercount. A copy of "The Eye Of Argon" that came in at 10900 words got a 4% overcount by my code and a 2% overcount by OO.
Due to the author's lack of programming sophistication, you shouldn't type the word "end" between two tildes (~) in a note. This pattern is used internally to indicate the end of the text of a given note upon saving the notebox. Occurrences of this pattern in your notes will be removed.
(note: if other programs, like the window manager, handle these first, NBMM won't see them)
Everywhere
----------
Ctrl-S
Save the notebox
Ctrl-F
Show/Hide Find & Replace dialog.
In the grid
-----------
SPACE
add or remove the current note (or selection) to or from the outbox.
control-arrows
swap the current cell with the next cell in the arrow's direction
arrows
move to the next cell in the arrow's direction (shock horror)
shift-arrows
move to the next cell in the arrow's direction and establish a selection. See SPACE.
Ctrl-C
Copy note to clipboard.
Ctrl-V
Paste from clipboard. Overwrites contents of active note.
Ctrl-Shift-V
Insert note from clipboard.
Ctrl-X
Cut note to clipboard.
HOME
go to top of column
END
go to last used cell in column
ALT-HOME
go to beginning of row (first column)
ALT-END
go to end of row (last column)
INS
insert a blank cell/move all lower cells down one notch
DEL
delete a blank cell/move all lower cells up one notch. Won't delete an occupied cell.
BACKSPACE
blank the current cell.
In the editor
-------------
Ctrl-C,Ctrl-X,Ctrl-V
Stock editing keys
Ctrl-Y
Delete from cursor to end of line
Alt-End
Cursor to the end of the current paragraph.
Ctrl-Return
Cursor to the end of the current paragraph, insert a Return.
Ctrl-.
produces an ellipsis ("...");
Ctrl-'
produces single dialog quotes ("''") and leaves the cursor between them
Ctrl-"
produces double dialog quotes ('""') and leaves the cursor between them
Ctrl-( (i.e. Ctrl-Shift-9)
produces a set of parentheses ("()") and leaves the cursor between them
Ctrl-< (i.e. Ctrl-Shift-,)
produces a set of angle-brackets ("<>") and leaves the cursor between them
Ctrl-{ (i.e. Ctrl-Shift-[)
produces a set of curly brackets ("{}") and leaves the cursor between them
Ctrl--
yields a double dash (" -- ");
Ctrl-# (i.e. Control-Shift-3)
inserts a scene break in the form of a blank line, #, and another blank line
Ctrl-1 through Ctrl-9
move the cursor to various positions within the note (fractions of the total number of lines)
Shift-F10
Editor's context menu
For some reason you can't Find or Replace tab characters -- you can't type them into the Find or Replace fields, of course, because the Tab key moves from control to control, but you can't paste them in, either, which is a nuisance.
The editor now permits cutting and pasting of selected text via Shift-Delete and Shift-Insert respectively.
There was a very old bug in various places: when iterating over all the notes in the notebox, I was counting by rows rather than columns, so if the row-count ever exceeded the column-count a Range Error would crop up. It took me about five years, but I finally hit 1000 rows in my main notebox and discovered the lurking fear -- I mean, bug.
Some may wonder why, if this is the Beta++++ release, the filenames of the downloadable archives specify 2006-03-17 instead of ++++.
I don't know either.
Well, on with the (substantial lack of) progress report.
First, the Department of the Inexplicable:
I'm currently running Mismanager under KDE 3.5.1, Linux Kernel 2.6.15.6, Slackware 10.2-current. Mismanager works as intended in this environment. On the other hand, substituting XFCE (either 4.2.2 or 4.2.3.2) for KDE results in Mismanager hanging with considerable use of CPU when exiting from the window manager environment to the login manager. I have no explanation for this. I suggest you shut Mismanager down manually by File|Exit, or Exit Mismanager from the floating Ikon's contextual menu, until you can verify by 'top' or similar that nothing's going awry.
Bugs addressed since Beta+++:
# The Boilerplate and Keywords functions in the Editor Navigator were broken. No one noticed, not even me.
# So was the "Special" menu.
# Saving a notebox under a new name (or for the first time) wasn't updating the hint on the floating Ikon.
# If you select a range of notes in the note grid, Mismanager will either a) add that selection to the outbox automatically, or b) ask you what to do with it, depending on whether the appropriate box is checked in the Set Preferences dialog. Up until now this preference setting was inexplicably not saved on exit; it is now. Idiot? Me? Well...yeah.
# Not unrelatedly, I had also forgotten to save the status of the Prefer Goals setting of the View menu (see the discussion of word count goals under "The Menu Bar: Note" and "The Menu Bar: View" if you wonder what Prefer Goals is all about).
# A previous bug fix intended to filter out extraneous "null" characters when saving noteboxes as textfiles managed to break Mismanager's ability to edit linked files.
New Features:
# Notebox Disorganizer's Set Standard Category Width option has been ported over and will be found, if you look for it, in the View menu. This sets the width of all categories in the grid; a feature whose time is long past, if that's the phrase I intend. (Individually sized categories are still not available; this is due to the uncontrollable-scrolling bug that has been discussed elsewhere in the documentation.) The grid redraws itself while you draw the slider control around, but a bit sluggishly, so you may have to wait for it to update; also, not every pixel's worth of difference actually matters for various reasons. Experiment!
# Word Count Goals (q.v.) now have progress bars in pretty colors (red, blue and a sort of purple), which you can show or hide by the appropriate selection (Progress Bars for Goals) in the View menu. Snazz! (Incidentally, setting or clearing a goal now marks the notebox as changed.)
# The Import Text Files As Links selection of the File menu now allows importing of .html files, because I wanted to use Mismanager's editor instead of Bluefish or Kate.
# Relatedly, the View Menu now has a "Show Linked Filenames" option.
Bugs addressed since beta++:
# Invoking the Find dialog when text was selected in the editor should have been inserting (or not inserting) that text in the Text-To-Find field in accordance with the Find-selected-editor-text option in Preferences, but wasn't.
# Some of the Editor Navigator's displays were not being cleared when they should have been.
# Some dialogs were not appearing in the correct color when NBMM was started using the -basecolor option.
# Some displays were not using the correct fonts when NBMM was started using the -font option.
# Some fonts were displaying in the wrong size when NBMM was started using the -size option.
# Some colors were incorrect when NBMM was started using the -basecolor option (every color using the hex digit F was wrong)
# When typing in the Find dialog's Replace field, the keys to invoke the Boilerplate and Keyword popups were not enabled (Ctrl-Shift-B and Ctrl-Shift-K; use Ctrl-Alt-B and Ctrl-Alt-K to add selected text as Boilerplate or Keyword).
# the size of the main window is now adjusted at startup if it's too large for the display (as can happen if you change to a lower monitor resolution between sessions).
# Changed the licence terms, as found in the source code: Borland requires distribution under version 2 of the GPL; I had failed to remove the clause in the preliminaries that allows the use of later versions.
# NBMM was not deliberately filtering out control characters when exporting to textfiles, on the grounds that I thought it was impossible to get control characters into NBMM; reality had other ideas, as I found out when KDE's Kate choked on a file that had a null in it. It now does so filter.
# NBMM's floating icon should now be visible to Red Hat users. More than you wanted to know: it had been accidentally defined as a minimized borderless window as opposed to a "normal" borderless window. Borderless windows, or so I'm told, should go unmolested by the window manager (e.g. KDE), and in Slackware and Debian this was the case, and so the floating icon appeared when it should; in Red Hat the system said to itself "Aha, a minimized window, I'd better not show it", and so it never appeared. (See also the Features section, below.)
# If you try to load a textfile into the editor and there is text in the editor, you will now be given a "replace or append" prompt. Previously you would get that prompt only if there was text AND that text had been changed -- which was not quite a data loss bug since you could Revert the editor.
# NBMM should no longer interfere with logging out of KDE. Kylix applications normally interfere with logging out of KDE; you'd either have to quit the application first by hand, or logout twice (the first attempt wouldn't work -- the application would shut down but give KDE a spurious "I couldn't quit (cos I was Doing Something Vital)" message).
# The Recent Files was supposedly saving and displaying 30 last-accessed files. In fact it was saving all the last-accessed files, though displaying only 30 of them.
# It's a good thing no one uses the Synchronized Notes feature, because the internal list of Synchronized Notes was being mishandled (somehow a line of code disappeared when porting Notebox Disorganizer).
# The Cut and Copy To Boilerplate functions in the editor were broken (for a reason exactly opposite to the fault in the Synchronized Notes function; possibly the missingly line of code came loose and got jammed in...no, surely not...)
New Features in Beta+++:
# The Find(/Replace) dialog has been redesigned.
+ Bounded Find is now Space-bounded Find. The Alt-B (for Bounded) shortcut was interfering with the Ctrl-Alt-B (add to Boilerplate) shortcut due to Someone Else's Bug.
+ You can clear the text in the Find and Replace fields with Ctrl-Backspace. The shortcut had been set up to use Ctrl-X, but Someone Else's Bug is eating Ctrl-Xes before NBMM can see them.
+ You can also clear the Find and Replace fields by clicking the new Clear buttons (black, with X> labels)to their left. This feature was swiped from Konqueror, and should simplify pasting new text in place of obsolete text.
+ The Find button now shows a line:column display to give some indication as to where the editor's cursor is, since the editor's cursor disappears when the editor is not focused.
# You can now start NBMM from the command line with new options, namely -t, -l, -w and -h:
./Mismanager -t=50 -l=100 -w=700 -h=550
"Top, Left, Width and Height?" you say? Yep! I should have added the more linuxly correct -geom option, which would in this case be -geom 700x550+0+0, but didn't find out about it until too late. I may yet, if I get any complaints.
# There is now a new option available from the Floating Icon's contextual menu: the debatably well-named Edit Blank Clipboard. Sometimes what ought to be on the clipboard just doesn't seem to be there, and this is one reason for applications like KDE's Klipper. But what if you don't have Klipper, and no matter how often you select or Ctrl-C, the snippet of the clipboard displayed at the top of the Floating Icon contextual menu never changes from what it was before? Try this -- choose Edit Blank Clipboard, select the problem text, and middle-click it into the Blank Clipboard window. Often this will -- gasp! -- actually work! Then just close the window; you'll a "do you really want to save changes" prompt, to which the answer is presumably yes, followed by the Floating Icon's contextual menu again. See how the clipboard snippet is now correct? Go about your business with a lighter heart!
# Also new to the FI's contextual menu: "Mark Unchanged", a duplication from the main window's File menu, and Set Preferences, a duplication from the Tools menu. Why? Because!
# Also also new: accelerator keys, mostly because the FICM is also available from Tools|Tray Menu and presumably that was invoked from the keyboard.
# Clicking the FI will cause it to change colors. This was mostly for testing purposes and stayed in for K00|_|\|3$$.
# Relatedly, the FI no longer turns red when the contents of the notebox have changed; it instead turns purple, and gives a flashing red 5-second-warning when the auto-save is about to kick in. Possibly this should be a longer warning,,,possibly I should allow it to be defined...possibly I should allow custom colors...possibly I should go on to the next feature!
# Middle-clicking the FI now toggles the NoteboxPad, rather than just showing it.
# On exiting NBMM with text on the Notebox Pad, you now have a total of three options as to what to do with that text: save it to Notes, save it Elsewhere, or discard it. Previously it was Notes or nothing.
# On exiting NBMM with unsaved changes having been made to the editor, you are now asked if you want to keep them rather than if you want to discard them.
# For some reason I had disabled the export-notebox-to-textfile function; I put it back. Also, the contents of the File menu have been twiddled; see the File Menu documentation for details.
# File|Quit is now File|Exit.
# An undocumented feature is hereby documented: you can import textfiles to NBMM by dragging them from Konqueror (other file managers too, possibly) and dropping them on NBMM's floating icon. This was in place for some time but not mentioned because it didn't work reliably.
Odd Note: somewhat contrary to the original errata item down there at the bottom of this category, I find that NBMM does not in fact write its .nbx files using CR/LF pairs -- not consistently all the way through, anyway. In practice this doesn't seem to matter, unless you're trying to use the same file in a Win/Lin dual boot situation; nonetheless, this is one reason why this release of NBMM is listed as Beta+++ rather than Gamma. I guess I'll have to see about making it more consistent one way or the other.
Bugs Addressed since Beta+:
# There was a careless and nasty bug in the move-selection-to-category code that would move your selection into the bit bucket rather than your target category. It would bite if your selection included unused cells.
# As Kylix (so far as I can tell at the moment) provides no way to read the status of the keyboard modifier keys (Ctrl/Alt/Shift/etc) on an as-needed basis, Mismanager does The Best It Can. If you click in the Grid Navigator and Mismanager thinks the Ctrl key is down it will assume that you're trying to make a selection in the navigator and not move to the note/category clicked on. What with one thing and another it was occasionally misinformed; it has now been tweaked and should keep somewhat better track now.
# Pressing Tab to move between the controls in the Find dialog will now take you to the next reasonable control. I had forgotten to set the order explicitly.
# On the main form, you can no longer Tab into the editor. Since you can't Tab out of it, this seemed reasonable.
# In Notebox Disorganizer it was possible to make selections in the Grid Navigator and perform operations on them by way of the Navigator's contextual menu. Mismanager was supposed to work the same way, but surprise, there's a bug in Kylix that prevented it. Steps Have Been Taken, and it is now possible. Only contiguous selections are supported at the moment, which means the aforementioned Ctrl key is still useless in that context, but we'll see...
Enhancements since Beta:
# The Grid Navigator's Big Notes section is now Big|Small Notes. If you hold the Ctrl key while selecting this option, you'll get a dialog asking for your definition (in characters) of a Big (or Small) Note. Entering 1000 would find and display all the notes larger than 1000 characters; entering 1000s or 1000S would find and display all the notes smaller than 1000 characters.
Bugs Addressed since Beta:
# The automatic backup (which consists, incidentally, of a "cp -p -f" shell command) was -- not unreasonably -- failing when the pathnames involved contained spaces. They are now 'quoted'.
# Importing text files no longer fails on zero-length files.
# In the editor, doing a replace-all with nothing now works correctly.
# The text color of the statusbar had been set to black, which was not such a good thing, contrast-wise. And some other text captions were mis-sized.
Enhancements since Beta:
# NM now looks nicer under the XFCE window manager. (The Application Style is now "dsWindows"; it had been coming up as "dsMotif" -- yech!)
# Also for the sake of XFCE, a "-basecolor=rrggbb" startup switch has been added, so you needn't suffer the stone-grey look if you don't want to. rr gg and bb are hex digits, and the whole string is an RGB color value.
-basecolor=eeeedd (a.k.a. -basecolor=EEEEDD) looks quite nice...
# Closing the main form now closes the Find dialog as well.
# Find-text that includes CR substitutes is now displayed more appropriately in not-found messages.
# Attempting to launch a URL that contains an & will now give a warning message that it may not work. (Konqueror throws away the first & and everything after it. I don't have Firefox installed at the moment.)
# When quitting with unsaved text in the noteboxpad, the do-you-want-to-keep-this dialog now includes a sample of the unsaved text.
# After a selection is established in the notegrid, NM checks whether the Ctrl key is down; if so it will pop up a menu asking what to do with the selected notes. As opposed to just adding them to the Outbox, you can Classify them or do a Move To Category.
# Reworded the error message that gets printed if you try to use Microsoft Sans Serif as a font, as I discovered that it doesn't *always* get rendered incorrectly.
Notebox files are saved with Windows style CRLF line endings instead of Linuxish LF line endings. The idea was to allow using the same notebox in a dual-boot situation, though whether this is still possible is an open question; I haven't tried it.