What did you do with your Tomboy Notes when that app became obsolete? Found anything better than GNote?

[yellowfinch]

When I replaced Windows with LM, I started with LM 17.3. The “Official note-taking app” was Tomboy Notes. I adopted it and ran with it. I have a fairly large amount of notes and many of them are mission-critical.

Then, as of LM 19.3, Tomboy Notes was replaced by Gnote, but Tomboy Notes was still in the official repo up to LM 19.3, which is what I’m using now.

GNote was not a proper replacement for Tomboy Notes. I explained some of the reasons in this post, a year ago. And, as of LM 20.2, GNote has been replaced as the official note-taking app: Sticky is even less appropriate.

So I kept using Tomboy Notes.

But I would like to migrate to LM 20.x, so I have been looking for an alternative. To date, I have investigated these:

Encryptic
FeatherNotes
FromScratch
GloboNote
Joplin
Laverna
Markor
NixNote
Notable
QOwnNotes
Quentier
Simplenote
Standard Notes
TomboyNg
Trilium Notes
Zettlr
Zim

I actually installed and tried several of these on an LM 20.2 test machine and found that many are essentially identical to GNote. Others are even more bare-bones than GNote, while some (such as Zettlr) are extremely complex – overly so.

The one that comes closest to the original Tomboy Notes appears to be Zim. It supports all the text formatting I have been using, i.e. not only the usual bold and italics, but also highlight, strikethrough, underline and fixed-width (which it calls "verbatim" and is even invokable by the same Ctrl+T command as in Tomboy Notes, by default). It also supports multi-level bullet lists and numbered lists, which are very important to me, plus a nifty 5-state checkbox feature that would probably be quite useful.

There might be a problem (for me) with the Ctrl+D command in Zim (or “Insert” > “Date and Time...” if done via the menu), which doesn’t offer my usual format. It seems to offer a way to customize it but I haven’t been able to figure it out yet. I rely on this a lot and I expect it to at least bring up the date and time in a specific format, if not with a distinct font, as Tomboy Notes does (through a plugin).

But the killer is that Zim cannot import HTML or XML notes! (You can open them, but they are not interpreted.)

After months of research, I haven’t found a single application that can import and interpret HTML (which is the only format that Tomboy Notes can export) or XML (which is the storage format of Tomboy Notes). Many apps can import the Evernote format, which is proprietary, so there are apparently no converters for that. I am not a programmer, so writing my own XML to MD converter is not an option.

I find it hard to believe that I would be the only one in this situation.

I would appreciate hints from people who have actually migrated their Tomboy Notes to something else (other than GNote) in LM 20.x.

[spamegg]

Tomboy-NG is probably your best bet. https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy-ng
I was able to easily install and run it on my Mint 20.2: https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy- ... _amd64.deb
I cannot say much about importing old existing Tomboy notes though.

[yellowfinch]

Tomboy-NG is probably your best bet.
I cannot say much about importing old existing Tomboy notes though.

Thanks, but Tomboy-NG is among the ones I have already tried: it is listed in my post, above (as TomboyNg). It is essentially the same as GNote, so it is not adequate.

GNote and Tomboy-NG use the same XML format (with a .note extension) as the original Tomboy Notes, so there is no "importing" issue; you simply move the content of the ~/.local/share/tomboy/ folder to the corresponding folder of the new app while neither is running.

But that's the only issue they solve.

There are too many features missing from GNote and Tomboy-NG, given what is already present in my Tomboy Notes (multi-level bullet lists, text attributes, etc.) and they are almost unusable without a pointing device. (I need an app that works with the keyboard.) Also, the search function of Gnote and Tomboy-NG is extremely deficient.

[spamegg]

Ah my bad, I was under the impression that Tomboy-NG was a continuation of Tomboy Notes. Because it says here https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy "Please note that this repo is for the previous generation of Tomboy, which is no longer actively developed. See Tomboy-NG for current activities."

The above is programmed in C#, which means it would need the Mono Framework to run on Linux, that's why Mint devs removed it. But regardless of the Mint devs' decision to remove it, it seems like it's not maintained any more.

So you are saying that for some reason the new version is lacking features? Like, the old Tomboy Notes had features that were REMOVED in Tomboy-ng? That is very very strange. I guess if they rewrote the code in a different language and removed the Mono dependency, some features might be missing. The focus of Tomboy-ng seems to be aiming for having no dependencies.

Unfortunately this kind of thing happens in free software when things go unmaintained for years, and it takes time (sometimes years) to "recover" old features.

It seems like you really really want those features, and nothing out there has the features you want. I think you should make feature requests to Tomboy-ng or get involved in the development. Tomboy-ng developers would be the ones who are most familiar with/most likely to implement the features of the old Tomboy notes.

Otherwise your other option is to install Mono on Mint 20 and then install the old Tomboy notes manually from source. Or just give up on those features (for a while) and use Zim.

[yellowfinch]

So you are saying that for some reason the new version is lacking features?

Yes. That is why I wrote that post last year, titled For the record: Gnote does NOT “provide the same functionality as Tomboy”, and to which I provided a link in the first post of this thread. In that post, I had also mentioned that feature requests for GNote had been going nowhere for years, and that is still the case today. In fact, isn't it because it is no longer maintained that it was replaced with Sticky as of LM 20.2? In any case, each change has resulted in a loss of more features.

Or just give up on those features (for a while) and use Zim.

Zim has all the required features but is not an option because it cannot import HTML nor XML notes, as I mentioned in the first post of this thread.

[Don_Pedro]

Hi everyone.
Light,fast, useful features Sticky does the job.
I would like to take advantage of this post to say thank you to Stephen Collins.
https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/194

[tenfoot]

Have you considered Cherrytree? I seem to remember that it has been recommended on several occasions in the past. I see from a quick browsing of this webpage https://giuspen.com/cherrytreemanual/#_importing that it imports HTML. There is a review of its capabilities at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxEW1LibvEg and can be downloaded from https://github.com/giuspen/cherrytreeht ... cherrytree

[yellowfinch]

Have you considered Cherrytree?

Yes. Not only is it among the many that I considered, I even installed and tested that one. The first disappointment was that, while it did manage to import my Tomboy notes, the result did not include any links between notes. (Links can be recreated manually, one by one, if it's important to you.) But the killer was that, overall, it is BUGGY! Twice, while moving nodes to a diffrent sub-node, it froze, ramping up the CPU to 100% until I killed the process.

[MattJ86]

I recommend Obsidian. It can be used as a note taking app with Markdown support, but with plugins it turns into data collecting monster. It supports links between notes or certain places in notes, embedded videos, soundfiles (there's voice recording addon), pictures, links etc. You can even download plugins to place mind maps created within webapp embedded into the note, you can create presentations and stuff. But you don't have to use these features and use it as a basic note taking app with trees of notes and folders. There are also tons of themes for the app to make it look whatever you want or you can create your own with CSS. And most of iconic function of obsidian is showing a graphical map of your notes an links between them.

The app is free until you want to use sync/cloud feature to have data access on all of your devices.

Website: https://obsidian.md/

Install on Mint:

Code: Select all

flatpak install flathub md.obsidian.Obsidian

[yellowfinch]

I recommend Obsidian.

According to its FAQ, it can only import notes in .md format, which makes it the same as Zim with regard to the situation I described in my original post, above. Tomboy can only export HTML. I have searched long and hard for a tool that would convert either HTML or XML (Tomboy's internal storage format) to MD but did not find a simple solution.

[johnnie]

Am currently using LMDE Elsie with Tomboy in the repo.
It runs fine. if I recall, Debian also runs tomboy or maybe Fedora.

Like you, am in too deep with Tomboy to switch and sought
out distros which still supported it. The shoe will drop at
some point and have considered Tomboy_NG. It may now
have (some) of the features you seek (nested bullets).

On my side, have not had luck with format, meaning,
replicating Tomboy format in NG. If you must move to
another apps, consider NG. Dave Bannan developed the
program and has a fantastic attitude.

[sohitrharma]

I have searched long and hard for a tool that would convert either HTML or XML (Tomboy's internal storage format) to MD but did not find a simple solution.

Would this make the cut: https://mixmark-io.github.io/turndown/ ? You'd have to manually copy-paste each note though.

https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text is another option

[JosephM]

I actually use Sticky Notes when I need the functionality now. It's included in Mint by default and developed by one of the Mint developers.