primenote 1.3

Fanciest sticky note-taking application. Now with Vim!

PrimeNote

PrimeNote is an intuitive sticky note-taking application for Linux and Windows. It allows the user to effectively edit, store and organize an infinite number of notes. PrimeNote supports various operation modes, such as plain text, rich text, image, vim or console (terminal emulator). It is well structured and fully featured, including;

• Always on top notes, without cluttering the taksbar
• Druide Antidote grammar tools built-in support (v9 and 10)
• Smart formatting, using 'enhanced plain text' where the input is standardized, yet allows basic text decorations
• Cross-platform compatibility, with official support for Linux and Windows 7-10
• Neat organization, with all data stored by folder structure using human-friendly formats
• Fernet encryption, to protect sensitive data
• Quick search built-in keyboard-driven tool to browse among note titles and content
• Special paste feature to quickly copy text from PDF documents
• Images support, with basic viewing features
• Fully customizable appearance, menus, hotkeys and mouse events
• Cloud and virtual machine support, edit a shared note repository in real time
• Command-line interface access to all notes (see pnote -h)

Its open source software is licensed under GPLv3.

Getting Started — Installation

MS Windows

• For Windows 7 and above, download and execute the latest NSIS installer

Arch Linux

• Install primenote-git from the AUR
• Install gvim and qtermwidget community packages (optional)

Debian

PyPi package

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-setuptools
sudo pip3 install primenote

Vim and Console modes support

• Install QTermWidget with PyQt bindings QTERMWIDGET_BUILD_PYTHON_BINDING=ON
• Install vim-gtk (with client-server mode enabled)

Advanced Features

Customizable window styles and palettes

• All notes are decorated using CSS files located at the program root;
  • ui/global.css: defines the overall geometry and style for all notes
  • ui/styles/*: overrides and extend global.css attributes
  • ui/palettes/*: handles widgets and icons color schemes
• Users can extend those with custom palettes and styles, override or ignore them
• PrimeNote adds its own CSS selector NoteDecorations for enhanced customization

Console mode (experimental)

• In this mode, the text box is replaced with a native terminal emulator
• When a shebang is found, the file content is automatically executed in the terminal
• More QTermWidget color schemes can be added into ui/terminal
• For more details, see QTermWidget GitHub Project page

Vim mode

• Provides a fully featured Vim instance in every note
• System-independent vimrc file and theme files
• Two-way communication between Vim servers and PrimeNote command-line interface
• Default settings allow for a seamless design between the text editing modes

Cloud and virtual machine support

PrimeNote can be used simultaneously across two operating systems (OS) or onto a cloud drive. Thus, one can share a note folder with another user, a backup server or a virtual machine.

PrimeNote fully supports symbolic links (symlinks) on Linux, and partially on Windows. Hence, all notes can be stored in a remote location simply by replacing the notes repository folder with a symlink. Likewise, a symlink can be added into the repository. On Windows, however, please note that shortcuts do not equal symlinks, which require administrator privileges. Thankfully, PrimeNote provide a utility to ease the addition of symlinks into the note repository.

Cloud storage

• Install and configure a cloud drive software (ie. RClone, DropBox, Google Drive)
• Open a PrimeNote instance and go to Settings > Advanced > Symbolic links
• Click on Create symbolic links
• Select a cloud drive as the target, enter a name for the folder (ie. Cloud)
• Click on Create symlink then Yes in the user account control prompt (Windows only)

Virtual machine

• Create a symlink to the host notes repository
• Place it into a folder shared with the client machine
• On the client side, open a PrimeNote instance and right click on the tray icon
• Select Open in a file manager
• Replace the opened folder by the symlink, or add the symlink into it

Limitations

• Rename and move operations on symlinks will behave unexpectedly if used across two OS
• Nested symlinks are not yet supported on Windows

Issues and bugs report

PrimeNote was developed on Windows 7 and Openbox using tint2 panel. It will work with other desktop environment, but the system tray icon may behave unexpectedly on some. It should work fine with Mate and Windows 10, and be usable with KDE, Cinnamon and Xfce. Please report any bugs in the issues section, along with the last session log. The logs can be found in ~/.config/primenote/logs on Linux and C:\Users\<user>\primenote\logs on Windows.

Contribution

Help from graphic artists is much needed, for a logo, a banner and a corresponding application icon.
Python developers are more than welcome to provide some unit tests.
You can also buy me a drink !