Tag: text

  • Notation Is A Simple Note Taker

    Notation Is A Simple Note Taker

    notation

    Notation is a lightweight and simple note taker not too dissimilar to CintaNotes. Its interface can be called minimalist and its features focused on one task. Perhaps crucially Notation doesn’t insert text via a shortcut, it only creates a new note.

    At first install the program checks if its default ‘New Note’ shortcut or hot key is used by the system and offers the user a change from the default Win+N. The New Note and Search (default Win+Shift+F) hot keys can be changed anytime and even disabled in Notation’s settings (Edit —> Settings).

    To add notes one starts by typing in the bottom portion of the program window, the notes are automatically saved and the first line or few words are used as the note title. The search is as you type highlight across all notes and seems fast. Notation can import text files and exports to html files. The export supports the markdown syntax.

    Notation saves the notes in xml format. To help make the notes portable across devices Simplenote is supported, the details should be added in the Simplenote tab of the settings. Notation works on Windows Vista and newer.

  • ClipMe To Manage The Windows Clipboard

    ClipMe To Manage The Windows Clipboard

    ClipMe

    A new entry in the clipboard management software category is ClipMe (not the first software or app to use that name?). It is currently at the 0.1.0 beta stage and there is potential for development and lots more to come. At this time ClipMe is basic and does not do all that much. However it is functional even as is.

    Use Windows’ usual Ctrl+C to capture text, files and images that are stored in ClipMe’s database. Bring up the manager (Ctrl+Shift+O by default, configurable via the Preferences) to view them and their size. Hover over any captured image in the list to get a preview, edit any text entry if needed.  Delete any entry by clicking on the X beside it. At the bottom of the manager window there is an option to change the number of items ClipMe keeps and remembers, the default is 30.

    Currently to reuse an item it is necessary to click on it in the manager window or on it via the program’s tray icon (right click the icon).

    The hot key to enable or disable ClipMe’s clipboard tracking is Ctrl+Shift+E, it can be configured to use another combination. ClipMe can be configured to ignore any of the types of captures it supports so, for example, it is possible to use ClipMe only to capture images. ClipMe should run on XP and newer.

  • Notes Keeper: New Notes Organizer

    Notes Keeper: New Notes Organizer

    Notes Keeper

    Long time reader Asen alerted me to a relative new entry in the Notes Organizer category. Notes Keeper currently in Release Candidate or beta stage looks to have potential and already features a good set of useful features.

    On first start the user is prompted to create a new database (Ctrl+Ins or via the Note menu). The program interface is divided into cells listing the saved notes. The next step is no create a new note (Ctrl+N). Here a more familiar word processor type – with all the expected formatting options – window pops up. The note title can be edited, it can be added to a group and tags added. The group and tag can be created on the fly. Many other features are available such as inserting images, password protecting notes, using transparent mode, working in full screen, attaching files and always staying on top. There is also a search bar at the bottom of the main window which as of this review seems to search through note titles only.

    Notes Keeper

    Notes Keeper is portable and requires the .NET framework. At version 0.5 it is very interesting to see what the future brings and follow it to 1.0 and beyond.

  • Gwennel Doc : Freeware Notebook

    Gwennel Doc : Freeware Notebook

    Gwennel

    Gwennel Doc is a notebook that is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and supports the odt open document file format.

    Start by creating a new notebook, save it with a name and start typing. It is possible to just leave it at that, type, insert images, tables and links and have notes that are portable using the aforementioned xml based standard format.

    However it is also possible to define presets or styles to use to format the notes. Either through the Format menu or by right clicking any one of Text, Paragraph, Bullets and Numbering and Table different fonts, colors, margins, line spaces, table widths and other styles can be defined for use in a notebook. These new styles will be available in the toolbar drop down menus for text, paragraph and bullets.

    The default font used by the program is Tahoma but if a style is created to with another font for text then it can applied to any part of the notebook. Right click Text —> New Style and choose the font. Start typing and apply the style to it by highlighting text and choosing the style from the toolbar drop down. The same can be done to a paragraph for its font, alignment, background color, line spacing, border, and indentation. Bullets and Numbering can have number or bullet styles, different spacing, alignment and others (see image below). Similarly a table’s border, width, margin, cell colors (including alternating colors) can be saved as a style and applied via the Table —> Insert Table menu.

    Gwennel

    Gwennel Doc (version: 0.14) is portable and very lightweight, a few sample styles are available as a separate download but the main download comes with a sample and documentation that can serve as a reference itself.

     

  • Notepas: Multiplatform Text Editor

    Notepas: Multiplatform Text Editor

    Notepas

    Notepas is a multiplatform free text editor with some advanced features. It is feature filled and mostly aimed at programmers. Most features are available docked by using the corresponding menu or button to make the options visible on the left hand side of the program interface. It supports several highlighters for different languages. Notepas is a solid option at version 0.9.23 and can do a lot, a few of its features are listed below.

    It has several levels of code folding, the 0 button that has a drop down to 9  folds code several child or inner nodes making it very easy to view a document’s hierarchy. Code filter under Tools can search for specific strings and show only lines containing it. Code Shaper also under Tools can do some advanced text filtering by adding a comma after a string of code, trimming space, removing line breaks and more. One simple example is adding line breaks. In the first screenshot one part of the sample XML snippet is highlighted, when breaks lines before </firstname> is applied it is converted to the form in the second screenshot. Of course this example is meaningless but is one trivial example of the kind of things Notepas is capable of.

    The selection menu has options to to toggle case of selected text, convert tabs to space, strip first characters, strip markup, add comment code and other text manipulations based on the word or characters in the selection.

    Notepas

    The program’s settings window (Settings—>Settings) is mainly for customizing the appearance of the code such as colors, character spacing and other highlight options. There is an option to increase font size or stay on top or restrict Notepas to one instance as well.

    Notepas is available in portable download for both 32bit and 64bit systems as well as Linux machines.

  • List.it: Notes In Browser Sidebar

    List.it: Notes In Browser Sidebar

    list-it

    List.it is a no frills notes keeper that resides inside Firefox’s sidebar. It is simple and open source and provides an option to synchronize notes but they are kept locally if the user does not use or ignores the sync option.

    Install the add-on and access the sidebar interface via Ctrl+Shift+F. Enter any text and save, access the settings by clicking the gear icon. By default the top line of a note is shown, click the arrow icon to expand all. Click x if a note needs to be deleted and use the garbage can icon to view the dustbin where deleted notes can be restored or permanently deleted. It is possible to edit notes by clicking on them, and search or print them too.

    Right click anywhere on a page to bookmark the page in list.it or highlight, right click and copy text to list.it. In the latter list-it will also append the url of the page the text was copied from (see first note in screenshot)

    If using the synchronize option click the yellow triangle icon and sign up for their service and install list.it where you need the notes. For security quoting the About and FAQ pages:

    List.it is a research project from the Haystack Group at MIT CSAIL by a small team of students led by Prof. David Karger. List.it’s chief designers are electronic Max and Greg Vargas.
    List.it is released as free and open source software under the MIT License. The source code is available on our Google Code Project.

    With respect to data handling policies, we use strong-grade SSL (AES-256) to encrypt all client server communications (HTTP traffic) and have signed our server with a certificate.

    List-it should work on Firefox 3.0 and later.

  • Firefox Add-on: Save Text To File

    Firefox Add-on: Save Text To File

    Save Text To File

    Save Text To File is a simple but potentially time saving add-on for Firefox. Saving text for future use and reference is a situation that many encounter. There are countless ways of dealing with and managing things found online. Bookmarking the page, saving the whole page, using ‘read it later’ tools and add-ons or setting up outliners/organizers like CintaNotes to save the text, just to name a few.

    Save Text To File is potentially another, it is perhaps minimalistic and simplistic but that is possibly its strength too. It is a No Restart add-on that adds an item to the right click menu. Highlight any text and right click to save it to a text file. The initial setup is as no frills as the add-on itself. The name of the text file and its location is configured as are options to add a line separator, date and time stamp and the url of the page the text is copied from. One can also choose to have separate text files for each use or append every thing to one file. In the screenshot I have checked the ‘Confirm settings’ option, this prompts the user to choose and set options every time the add-on is used. I can see no reason why this would be necessary and would recommend it be unchecked.

    Save Text To File

    Firefox’s internal bookmark system is just one big mess for anybody who has many bookmarks, I see this as one potential, albeit crude,  addition to it when the option to save urls is used.

    Save Text To File works on Firefox 19 and newer with an older version available for older versions.

     

  • Clipjump Does The Clipboard Well

    Clipjump Does The Clipboard Well

    Clipjump

    Clipjump is a very capable freeware clipboard manager. It , of course,  holds many clipboard items and does its job without disturbing familiar Windows routines such as Ctrl+C, V and X. It provides a tool tip like confirmation and visual, for example one that confirms that it has copied items.

    Clipjump captures all data types, when Ctrl+C is used it captures text, images (through the PrintScreen key) and other data such as Excel cells and when Ctrl+V is used to paste repeated V clicks cycles through clipboard items with a preview so it is very easy to paste any previous items. There is an incognito mode to temporary disable captures, right click tray icon—>Options. Windows+C pops up the clipboard history window to view and work on captured clips. It is possible to ‘fixate’ items to make them stay on top or first in the history and therefore being the first when using paste mode or when clicking Ctrl+V. Clipjump also supports ‘channels’ to keep items separate, the default channel is zero. The channel name in use is shown when Ctrl+V is clicked and channels can be changed by using the up and down arrow keys in the aforementioned paste mode. No Formatting is also a very useful feature and when in paste mode (after clicking Ctrl+V) clicking on the Z key readies the chosen item without formatting.

    The Action Mode, activated via the tray icon or Ctrl+Shift+A, provides one click access to program features.

    The Class Grab Tool which is supposed to grab Windows classes is also interesting. It allows Windows classes to be added to its settings.ini’s ignoreWindows option so that Clipjump will not be used when items are copied from those programs. Lots more settings are configurable through settings.ini such as windows_copy_shortcut and windows_cut_shortcut that ‘create unique shortcuts in Clipjump to copy/cut data only to System Clipboard and not Clipjump’.

    The program settings have a ‘one time stop’ option whose shortcut is configurable which when used bypasses Clipjump for only one time.

    The usefulness of Clipjump lies in the fact that it can be used to naturally replace the native Windows clipboard but also really extend it with additional features beyond simply storing multiple items. It is very lightweight, portable and at version 9.8.8 (there are frequent updates) it is very solid.

    The online manual and internal help are detailed if not exactly very well organized.

  • dnGREP: Content Search And Replace For Windows

    dnGREP: Content Search And Replace For Windows

    dnGREP

    In an earlier review  for FileSearchy commenter smaragdus wondered out loud if there are any utilities that support searching in epub (and fb2) files. Indeed the search for such a tool seems to confirm that it is a rare feature. I stumbled upon dnGREP, however.

    dnGREP searches inside most text files and some like pdf  require a plugin which come with the program and reside in the program’s folder. It integrates with the right click menu, can search plain text, Word documents, inside archives and more. It wasn’t clear at first if the latter includes epub files, then I found a support question or feature request that was answered:

    You can enable this by modifying C:\Program Files\dnGREP\Plugins\dnGREP.Engines.Archive.plugin file.
    Just add epub to the list of extensions.

    The result can be seen in the screenshot above. dnGREP provides a a preview and highlights results, supports regular expressions and xpath. The user can also filter the search (icon to the far right of the Search in section) to restrict the search to specific path or type of files. Replace is supported and the >> button to the right of the Replace button provides custom actions such as Copy files, Move files, Delete files and File names to clipboard, Save as CSV and CSV to clipboard to copy the result file names for use elsewhere. The bookmark saves search queries for the future.

    The program’s options includes such settings as Show file path in results, Show results tree expanded and Show result lines in context X before and X after.

    Version 2.7.1 beta 2 used for this review, version 2.6.3 stable is also available for both 32 and 64 bit systems. Unfortunately, because it is usually better but difficult to avoid, dnGREP requires the .NET framework 4.0. dnGREP can be launched via the command line.

  • Note Shell: Simple Notes Manager

    Note Shell: Simple Notes Manager

    Note Shell (version: 1.5) is an open source, multi platform notes manager or note keeper as its author describes it. It is bare bones with nodes and sub nodes holding text with only color and font size as options.

    Note Shell

    Create a new node or child node by clicking the add button and start typing. To make sure a child node – instead of a sibling node – is created click the check box to the right of the the add button. Click on the node name to rename it to something more descriptive. Note Shell does require using the Save button, text is not auto-saved.

    The button with the question mark on it is not only the help file for the program but also where the settings are found. The settings include the aforementioned color and font size settings and the option to change the default files location. Changing the files location comes with two warnings:

    when setting different path to folder, first copy folder to destination, then set the path in program, else you can destroy node structure

    and

    be careful when setting different path to folder don’t forget / at the end of line

    There are a few keyboard shortcuts as well, the most notable is Ctrl+F to search inside the current node.

    Every node is saved as a text file in the program’s files folder. Note Shell does not require installation and is available for both Windows and Linux.