Ubuntu Tips: How To Manage Simple Projects Using Tomboy Notes

Question: How to create and maintain a very simple project that has few tasks in my Ubuntu laptop (or) Are there any other methods to take notes and organize ideas instead of using the inbuilt Text Editor that comes with Ubuntu?

Answer: Tomboy Notes is the notes maintaining mechanism gets ported with Ubuntu by default. Creating, Linking, Maintaining, Searching the notes are painless in Tomboy Notes.

In these examples, I’m using the following:

• Tomboy Notebook as Project
• Tomboy Notes as Project Tasks

Step 1: Create a New Notebook / Project using Tomboy

Click on Applications -> Accessories -> Tomboy Notes, this will launch the ‘Search All Notes’. Click on File -> Notebooks -> New Notebook to create a new notebook as shown below.

Fig: Create New Notebook using Tomboy

Enter the name of the notebook / project, as shown below. In this example, I’ve created a project called ‘Prod Server Setup’.

Fig: Specify New Project Name in Tomboy

Note: Once you’ve launched the tomboy, it will display the tomboy icon in the system tray for easy access.

Step 2: Create a New Project Task / Note using Tomboy

To create a new note (or) a new task to an existing project, Select the notebook name from the ‘Search All Notes’ window -> Right mouse-click -> New Note, as shown below.

Fig: Create New Task for Project Using Tomboy

Manage Tomboy Notes

In this example, I’ve created 4 tasks / notes to the ‘Prod Server Setup’ project / notebook as shown below.

Fig: Tomboy Project and Tasks (Notebook and Notes)

Tomboy notes has the following features that you can explore further:

• Text highlighting
• Spell check
• Auto-linking web url (http, https etc.) and email address
• Formatting using font style and size
• Bulleted lists
• Custom Plug-ins / Add-ons

From the “Search All Notes”, click on Edit -> Preferences, which will display the following Tomboy preferences window, which has the ability to set custom preferences on the following categories.

• Editing
• Hotkeys
• Synchronization
• Add-ins

Fig: Tomboy Preference Window