A to-do list in Tomboy

Otherwise, BasKet is a very good application for general note taking if you like the outline variety and especially if you like decorating your notes with stickers and badges. I’m sure they’ll get the bugs worked out in a future version and its possible that others won’t experience my problems with it so I still recommend it.

Thanks to everyone who sent suggestions. For now I’ve switched away from BasKet and started using Tomboy. Tomboy is a desktop wiki application (kind of like sticky notes on steroids). I was initially turned off because I’ve found wikis cumbersome to keep updated.

One of the things I don’t like about wikis, for example, is the need to manually create index pages. But I’ve discovered that Tomboy solves that problem fairly well through its search system. When you open the search window you immediately see an index of every page. Neat. Then entering keywords into the search box filters that list down (using a full-text search) to just the matching pages. (And when you open those pages, the matching term is highlighted.)

I also don’t like WikiCapitalizingSentences and was worried that re-titling a page would break all of the incoming links. Neither of those is a problem with Tomboy either since the first isn’t required (it’s not even the default) and it automagically renames all inbound links with the new title.

Tomboy also has three things that I think make it great for to-do lists: 1) You can easily create a bulleted list by starting a line with a hyphen 2) You can highlight important items (Ctrl-H) in yellow and 3) You can check off completed items by either deleting them or by drawing a line through them (Ctrl-S).

So what I’ve done is setup separate pages for each of my projects and then I can cross-link my to-dos directly to a project page just by typing its name. It’s organization without the need to fiddle with a note hierarchy outline and I can view my project page and to-dos at the same time (BasKet only lets you view one thing at a time). Pretty slick.

Overall, I find its apparent simplicity appealing. It works a lot like how I use my Moleskine note books with the added benefits of hyperlinking between pages and a built-in search function. I’m no longer tempted to fiddle with page layout, icons, or colors and basic text entry (especially for lists) is much more natural in Tomboy than in BasKet. I’ve only been using it for a few days so far, but barring any unforeseen problems I think I’ll be using Tomboy for a lot longer.

Comments

1. Carol Teach on 2008-12-06 10:43:47 wrote: I really love the Google Notebook application. It really helps me to clip sites I want to return to and let’s me annotate them. It’s available to me anytime, anywhere, 24/7. The only problem is I have so many notes - even though they are catagorized into several different notebooks - that it take me forever to go through all the resources. I have been lost in your blog for many hours on this Saturday and must log off and go do something -like cook a meal. I have used Google notebook to save many of the topics I’ve linked to from your blog -Yeah. I found you first through bighugelabs.com - Thanks so much for that site. My middle schoolers LOVE it. Carolyn Stanley