yank 0.2.1
by
Michael Hußmann <m.hussmann@home.ins.de>
INTRODUCTION
------------
A long time ago I used to write down my notes on paper and stored them in
folders which worked pretty well. After getting used to computing notekeeping
took place in files which were organized in directories and could be grepped in
order to find the stored information.
Yank is my attempt to improve this by using a program to operate on notes (add,
edit, delete, search, sort etc.) and have some convenience (it is possible to
perform these actions with the standard unix tools and it works well but I had
some time on my hands and wanted to play with gnome).
NEWS
----
News about yank can be found in the file 'NEWS' and on the yank homepage [1].
FEATURES
--------
- note organization in a tree structure
- 3 different types of notes
- sortable todolist
- drag & drop support
- searching for regular expressions or substrings
- saves xml (with optional compression)
- basic plugin system
REQUIREMENTS
------------
Yank uses gnome for the user interface and therefore it requires everything a
normal gnome program requires. Gnome can be found on [2]. Yank also needs at
least libxml-1.8.0 [3], libglade [4] and libgal [5] to compile.
Gnome-print is not required but used if a version >= 0.24 is found during
configuration.
INSTALLATION
------------
The standard installation files for programs using autoconf come with this
distribution which covers nearly everything. On most systems building and
installing will look like this (I skip the process of extracting and using cd
since you've obviously done it if you're reading this text):
$ ./configure && make
[..]
$ su root
# make install
[..]
# exit
NON OBVIOUS FEATURES
--------------------
FastGen
-------
Is avaliable through "Edit/ Text Selection/ FastGen" and used for the fast
generation of multiple text-notes by selecting one or more lines of text in the
body of an existing note which will be used as titles for newly created notes
below the parent.
Glade-Notes
-----------
Glade-notes will eventually replace the current "notes", to use them yank has
to be configured with --enable-glade-notes before compilation. After that
you'll find a new submenu Add/Testing/ which contains entries for all found
glade-notes. Durings startup yank looks in
./GddNotes
$prefix/lib/yank/GddNotes/<version>
~/.yank/GddNotes/<version>
for files with the extension .glade (.xpm's in the same dir are used as icons)
and creates menu entries from them.
Yank will search a widget named "vbox" inside a .glade-file and use it as the
root of the note and will use the names of entries buttons etc. for the
xml-file. There's a note named "test" which contains all widgets yank can
handle.
The whole thing isn't even completely useable (it's ok that yank crashes if
someone tries to use cut& paste with these notes since the functions aren't
there yet (you're right to note that yank should handle that corretly ...)) and
there'll be no script to update your files containing them if the format
changes in the next version (which is very likley to happen (only for glade
notes)).
Glade-artists are encouraged to create custom notes which will be added after
the whole thing has stabilised a bit. This also gives the chance to take the
requirements of those notes into account for the next version.
UPGRADING FROM EARLIER VERSIONS
-------------------------------
UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 0.2.0
------------------------------------
The internal representation of dates (number of days since 01.01.1970) has been
changed to the standard time_t (number of seconds since start of epoch) which
requires minor changes in the used file-format. Old files can be converted by
using:
$ ./utils/yankconv-0.1.5-0.2.0 < old.file > new.file
You can blame me for being lasy because there's no automatic detection of that
in yank but remember that you're using alpha quality software. :)
UPGRADING FROM VERSIONS BEFORE 0.1.0
------------------------------------
Yank versions before 0.1.0 did not use correct XML which has hopefully changed
now. Yank will automatically detect files from old versions and read them but
will change withspaces in notes which is not very nice. I wrote a pretty dirty
perl-script which will convert your old files. The script reads yank-files from
standard input and writes to the standard output so converting will look like
this:
$ ./utils/yankconv-0.0.2-0.1.0 < old.file > new.file
LICENSE
-------
yank - yet another NoteKeeper
Copyright (C) 1999, 2000, 2001 Michael Hußmann <m.hussmann@home.ins.de>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple
Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
References used in the text
---------------------------
[1] http://home.ins.de/~m.hussmann/software/yank/index.html
http://yank.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.gnome.org/
[3] ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/
[4] ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libglade/
[5] ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/unstable/sources/gal/
