NotePuppy Files

Welcome to the NotePuppy 0.7.x Text Editor.

@NotePuppy on Twitter.

NotePuppy is a minimalist text editor. It's not flashy, but it's not really complex to use either.

NotePuppy is a work in progress, and a lot of the features are either partly implemented, not implemented, or slightly shaky. Work on NotePuppy is ongoing, and these problems will be fixed. The next stable version of NotePuppy will hopefully be 0.7.5.



Using NotePuppy


-Basic Concepts

The central idea of NotePuppy is to have all files stored in permanent storage in a known location at all times. This is achieved by keeping all the files in a central directory. Files are saved in the background as you work on them. You can not have files in NotePuppy which aren't saved - there are no temporary files. That being said, you can create a directory in the file manager and use that for files which aren't permanent if you want to, in fact NotePuppy will create and give arbitrary names to files if you want.

NotePuppy was originally intended to work on small Linux devices (Nokia N900) or on unreliable prototype systems (other Linux machines which crashed regularly). With NotePuppy you can create files and work on them without need to save, and without any screen clutter - it's just pure, lovely, text. No trouble with saving files, no need to find places to store dozens of text buffers, and no problem with machines that crash - you seldom lose data.


-Actually using NotePuppy

When you first install and open NotePuppy, the application will create a folder in your home directory called 'NotePuppy'. This is where the application stores the files it works with. 

To get started, either right click in the open area and select 'New', pick 'New' from the 'Edit' menu, or press Cmd+N. The 'New File' dialog will open. This is the File Manager area, and shows a tree of the files and folders already in the NotePuppy directory, an area to enter the name of the file, and a check box to select if the new file is a File or a Directory. Enter 'test' and press OK, and a new file called 'test.txt' will open up in a new NotePuppy window.

Move the text editor so that it is not covering the File Manager area. You will see the name of the newly created file. You will also see a column showing the size of the file, and the date it was last modified. Once you start entering text into the editor, the application will start preparing to save the file, and will do so every 30 seconds. You can watch the values updating in the File Manager area. Mesmerising.

To save more often, press Cmd+S. Sometimes you just need the file saved straight away :)

When you close the editor, it will save the file again.

You can create directories in NotePuppy either by checking the directory checkbox, or by typing the name of the directory in before the file name, eg, 'directory/file' will create a file called 'file.txt' in a directory called 'directory'. The '.txt' file extension is appended automatically, but if you want to add your own just type it in. NP will add an extension if there are no dots near the end. Also, putting double quotes around the file name stops NP from adding the '.txt' extension.

To delete the file you either right click and choose delete, or go to the menu and delete, etc. Also, files can be deleted, moved around or edited externally - NP can handle that. Be careful not to move, delete or rename a file which is already open in NP - that's an issue that I'm still working on, and may crash the app!

Try out the other features in the menus. In the current release (0.7.3) not all of these are working, but hopefully they will all be running soon. 


-Quick NotePuppy

Sometimes you need a temporary file just to write some quick notes in. Press Shift+Cmd+N, and NotePuppy creates a file in the '/Quick' directory, and gives it a unique filename - basically, the time the file is created. Careful not to overuse this - you could either lose all the notes you made, or you could end up with an ENORMOUS 'Quick' directory.


-OneNotePuppy

NotePuppy on Unix (Linux or Mac) can be used with symbolically linked files. If you aren't a Unix guru, then a symbolic link is basically a shortcut to a folder in another place. You can fill the central NotePuppy directory up with links to other folders, and NotePuppy will administer these files as though they are it's own. For example, I have a NotePuppy folder in my Dropbox account which I use for shared files, and another one linked to a networked server, and then some local files specific only to the one machine. All in OneNotePuppy.


-New Editor Commands =)

Up until 0.7, the text editor was a very arid place. You had 'select all', undo and redo commands: not a lot. There was also a secret 'save' command, if you needed to save right away rather than waiting for the default save time. Version 0.7 introduces the following editor features:

- Set Translucent. You'd be surprised how useful it can be to have a seethrough window, sometimes.
- Set Full Screen. Block out all distractions and focus on the text, which is tastefully displayed in the centre of the screen.
TIP: if you are making notes from another document, try putting one blank full screen page behind it and the full-screened window you are working on in front of it. Press Cmd+U to make the active window see-through, and the documents you are working from visible.
- Soft Wrap on or off. Because sometimes it's nice to have one line per line.
- Hard wrap/unwrap. Shorten all lines to 80 characters, or restore text that has had that done to it. That's the one feature I have waited all my life to have, and although Emacs does have it, Emacs is not minimalist. Still needs some work on it, and the length which the lines wrap at needs to be added as a configurable value.
- Overwrite mode. NotePuppy is such a minimalist editor that it took nearly a year until it got Overwrite mode.
- Date Stamp. Pressing Cmd+D will get the local time and date added in euro-format. Date Stamp format should also be a configurable format as well. The actual format used for the dates should be configurable for NotePuppy users who aren't from Europe. Also, if you like this sort of thing, I would advise you check out text-expanding software in general, see here: http://lifehac.kr/9npiJ8
- Toggle fonts. Switch between monospaced and the default font with Cmd+L.
- Change font size: Cmd++ or Cmd+- makes the font bigger or smaller respectively.

When I get a chance to, I will add find and replace and this fancy-pants 'top and tail editing' kind of thing. The coding isn't that hard, I just have to get round to it.

- NotePuppy trivia

Version 0.7 has the codename 'Hill Street'.

NotePuppy is written in C++ using the Qt framework. Qt is stable and nice to work with, as well as working on scads of platforms. It even works on Nokia phones, although it won't for ever :(

NotePuppy was inspired by several other text editors which I have used in the past. Check em out, they are good:

Metapad, by Alexander Davidson - a great editor, find it at http://liquidninja.com/metapad/. Sadly, this is a Windows only editor.

OneNote, from Microsoft. A great piece of software, but doesn't save in plain text and (again) only works on Windows.

Kate from the KDE project - it's a useful and pretty editor, but also I think it does a little bit more than it should do.

Finally, the standard text editor which comes on Symbian smartphones. Good UI for a smartphone editor - just text. No lines, no cute fonts, no hassle.

Of course, I have used Emacs, Vi and Vim, and they are good editors in their place - well, Vi is anyway. But they have a learning curve, and that is not something that I want the NotePuppy to have.


This note was written in NotePuppy. We eat out own puppy food.


The NotePuppy team love hearing from people who use it - I was inspired to publish and work more on it when I learned that actually, people do use it. If you like NotePuppy, even only a little bit, then please get in touch!