# tomboy-ng help

tomboy-ng help Tomboy-ng is a rewrite of the much loved Tomboy Notes. It runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS. Is file compatible with Tomboy and GNote. Tomboy-ng notes support Bold, Italic, Strike-through, Highlight and Underline in four sizes, small, normal, large and huge. Notes can include hyperlinks to other notes, web pages or any (readable) file or directory on your system. Multilevel Bullets (Alt - left or right Arrow) and paragraph inset (Ctrl-Tab), either can be extended (Tab) or reduced (Shift-Tab). It can sync notes with other systems using Tomboy's File Sync model and / or a network based sync to Github. The latter allows you to read or edit you notes on line from a browser. Many users will want to have tomboy-ng start at logon time, it will put an Icon in the System Tray and you can interact with it via that Icon. However, to ensure we support some difficult platforms, a small window or splash screen is also opened, it can be dismissed if you see the system tray icon (or on some Gnome 3 systems, you have added it to your dock as a favourite). You can set that small splash screen to not open unless a bad note is detected at startup. Using tomboy-ng You will interact with tomboy-ng using a menu on a System Tray Icon (only some systems) or from a menu that appears on all major forms of the application. If you don't have a System Tray Icon (that's sad!) you add tomboy-ng to your Favourites so it appears on your dock, that way, you can always either start it or wake up its Search Form easily. From the search form, you can - Access the main menu (New Note, Settings, recent notes etc). Search for terms in all your notes. A search term like "John Smith" name will find all notes that use the word name anywhere and have exactly that combination of John Smith. It won't, for example find my name is Smith, John. Organise your notes into Notebooks, tomboy-ng will allow each note to be in more than one Notebook but if you sync or share your notes with the original Tomboy, don't turn that feature on. Rename a notebook, but if you sync your notes, do run a full sync first ! Generally tomboy-ng - notes are automatically saved as you make changes. allows you to change a notes's title by directly editing the actual title in the note window. automatically makes backup copies when you delete a note, if you need to know a note is really gone, go to Settings->Backup. has facilities to make snapshots of your notes from time to time, please use it! can sync your notes to a common file store so they are accessible from multiple machines (Linux, Windows or Mac), see https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy-ng/wiki/File-Sync-with-tomboy-ng Or sync, possibly only selected notes to your GitHub account, https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy-ng/wiki/Github-Sync does not share well. If you just put your notes on a shared drive (without using sync) be desperately careful that you don't have more than one tomboy-ng or Tomboy running at the same time. Bad things happen. Linking A major feature of Tomboy and its descendants is the automatic linking between notes. If you type the Title of an existing note, the words will become hyperlinks and a click will open that other note. Similarly, if you select some text and click the Links button, a new note with that Title and linked to from your existing note, appears. New in v0.38, clicking the Links button with nothing selected will display a clickable list of the notes linked to this one, Backlinks. New in 0.40, File Links. Use the Right Click Menu to select either a File or Directory link (or Alt-F or Alt-D) for a dialog where you select the file or directory in question. Or, if you know the full name and path, type file:// and that path and file name, eg file://Pictures/xmas.jpeg . If the file name or path contains a space, wrap it in double inverted commas. Windows uses the other slash as a file separator but the ones at the start of the URL must be as shown (much like a web addesss). The path should be relative to your home directory unless you start it with a slash, eg a Windows user may have a link like this file://"c:\my test.txt" This system relies on your Operating System's view of how to open a particular file, good idea to be sure it can open the type of file concerned before using it in a Note. In my case, new install of Debian, Firefox wanted to open .log files and does so very, very badly. Note that tomboy-ng cannot test these sort of links, it shows them in good faith. Web Links. In a similar manner, text that tomboy-ng thinks might be a web link is marked as a hyper link, a click will open your browser. Both forms of hyperlinks can be turned off in the settings window. Command Line Switches. -h or --help Show help and exit. -l CCode --lang=CCode Force Language, supported language codes as es, uk, fr and nl. Let us know if you want tomboy-ng in another language. --version Print version and exit --no-splash Don't show small status/splash window. Saves you from having to dismiss it at startup. Don't use unless you have checked you can see the small green system tray icon. --config-dir=PATH_to_DIR Create or use an alternative config. Mainly a testing feature but useful if you want to have two (or more) sets of independent (but not concurrent) notes for example. --debug-sync --debug-index --debug-spell Show what is happening during either sync, index or spell. Useful for debugging. They will write detailed progress reports relating to their section of the application to the console. However, Windows does not, for this purpose, have a console. But it can be told to capture this log info to a file using another command line switch or by setting an env variable that specifies a file name. Please ensure you have permission to write to the location specified. For example, from the start button, click run and type - tomboy-ng --debug-log=c:\debug.txt --debug-sync -c This is designed for users who want to make an operating system hotkey to create a new note window directly. Using this for a hotkey will start tomboy-ng if it is not running. --open-note=PATH_and_Name_to_NOTE Open a note in single note mode. In this mode, a separate process runs, it does not have access to the normal notes location, nor sync but can read, display, write back to or export a stand alone note. If the note name does not exist, a new note is created. If the note name specifies a plain text file or a rtf file, the contents of that file will be imported into a new note and that note will be named as specified on the command line but with an extension of ".note". In this mode, the note remains in its existing location, it is not moved to the tomboy-ng notes location, it is not synced, nor searched by tomboy-ng in its normal mode. Note that the switch (-o or --open-note) is optional. For example, "tomboy-ng some.note" will create or open "some.note" in the current directory. --save-exit Works only with the single note mode, will import (.note, .rtf, plain text) the file, convert to .note format (and note standard filename format) and save in the configured notes directory. Useful in scripting. --import-txt=FILE_NAME --import-md=FILE_NAME --import-note=FILE_NAME Import a text, markdown or note file into your default Note Repo, an existing instance of tomboy-ng will be told about it and it appears in your Search List. In each case, FILE_NAME is a full path and filename unless its in the current directory. Note that -t, -m and -n does the same thing. --title-fname Applies only when importing a file into your Notes Repository (but when importing a Note), filename as title instead of the first line of the file. --useappind=yes|no Only for Linux using gtk2 version. Will override tomboy-ng decision about how to try to display the System Tray Icon, its here to help with difficult systems that cannot seem to display that icon using the normal approach. --platformtheme qt5ct Use with Qt versions ONLY, will instruct the app to display the colors defined in qt5ct. The qt5ct app has a nice GUI where you can select the colors that suite you. Some other Qt specific options may also work using a similar syntax. Note there is not an '=' sign between the switch and its parameter. --allow-leftclick Use with Linux Wayland systems only. Due to some KDE (and possibly Gnome) installs working badely with Wayland, the System Tray Icon menu is activated with a Right Click. You can restore the familiar left click with this switch. But you may not like the result. --strict-theme Use only Qt theme colors for Editing Notes, as the note edit window needs more distinct colors than many themes provide, tomboy-ng defaults to using a few extra colors. Disable this behaviour with this switch. Applies only to Qt5 and Qt6 -platform xcb As many current Wayland using Linux systems have multiple problems, this setting should be used to use the much more mature libxcb instead. Problems it fixes include the inability to bring an open note to the foreground when clicked, inability to copy text from a note to an external application and inability to restore a note to its previous position. Applicable Qt5/6 only. Note different syntax to other options, that is because this option goes direct to the Qt Framework and is not seen by tomboy-ng. Setting an environment variable, QPA_PLATFORM=xcb has the same effect. -platformtheme gnome | gtk2 | qt5ct | qt6ct Qt application can be told where you want the app to look for its color theme. The external apps, qt5ct and qt6ct will let you establish your own colors, 'gnome' will use the existing gnome theme if you have gnomeplatform-qt5 also installed. The 'gtk2' setting works with some older systems and appropriate themes installed. Not all systems will work with all these options, you may need to experiment to some degree. Note different syntax to other options, that is because this option goes direct to the Qt Framework and is not seen by tomboy-ng. Setting an environment variable, QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gnome has the same effect. Mac Things Mac user require a slightly more complicated command line when using any of these command line switches. For example a Mac command line to generate a sync debug log would be - open tomboy-ng.app --args "--debug-log=$HOME/tomboy-ng.log" "--debug-sync" And, because of the .app approach, absolute paths need be used for parameters, or, use $PWD relative to your current directory - open tomboy-ng/tomboy-ng.app --args "-o" "$PWD/doc/tomboy-ng.note" 2025-01-11T17:24:01.5594918+11:00 2025-01-11T17:24:01.5594918+11:00 2018-11-07T16:01:06.6550000+11:00 1 1 1246 626 668 31 False