NotePuppy

The text editor with the cold wet nose

NotePuppy is a minimalist text editor designed to keep your notes and ideas in text files, in one place. If you like keeping a lot of notes in text files, and would like to keep them all in one place with the minimum of fuss, this could very well be the text editor for you.

The editor saves the files as you work on them, saving you from the chore of having to remember to press Cmd+S every few minutes or (worse) having to find places and names for however many text buffers you have open if you should need to reboot. It also protects you from crashes if you are on an OS which isn't overly stable: NotePuppy has been succesfully deployed on a bleeding-edge crash-prone Linux machine before, and so that was useful.

All the files managed by NotePuppy are stored in a central directory. If you are on a Unix machine (Linux or Mac), you can add symbolic links to the directory, and keep files from several places under the loving care of NotePuppy.

 


The NotePuppy main window

 

Files can not be opened in NotePuppy until they already have a space on the hard drive, and are then saved in the background while you work on them. So if you have an unstable computer, or a computer with a limited interface, or if you just plain forget, you know that the files are saved already. Files can be worked on by more than one application at a time, and NotePuppy is OK with that. For example, if you link your NotePuppy directory to a space on Dropbox, you can work on the same file at home, at work, or on your Mobile phone. Or if you just need to use a more powerful text editor than NotePuppy to make a few changes to a file, you can do this while its open in NotePuppy. You just need to tell NotePuppy to reload the file.

 


The duke of Wellington wrote this letter on his MeeGo Laptop while on the battlefields in Spain. He edited it that evening on his iMac, before emailing it back to London.

 

The current version, 0.7 (Hill Street) sees the addition of a few simple editor tricks to the user interface - although only a few, as it is a mininalist text editor. Currently working are the translucent mode:

 


This picture looks much better at full size. Click on it.

 

There is also a full-screen mode:

 


Block out everything on your screen. Cover the internet, email and messengers and concentrate on beautiful, pure, text.

 

There are a couple of other editor tricks left to do, but at the moment NotePuppy also has the following:

Also coming - find and replace, file information.

You want more?The NotePuppy probably isn't for you. NotePuppy is a minimalist text editor and as such is intended for the discreet storage of text. There are plenty of text editors in the world.If you are stuck, our friends at texteditors.org can certainly help find the right one.

You want less? I dream of having spare time, and I dream of filling it with all sorts of tasks. One day, maybe, I will refactor the actual text-editor out of NotePuppy so that it can be used as a standalone text editor. One day.

NotePuppy was never intended for release. I wrote it for my N900, which is a great phone but (at the time) had only lousy text editors available: raw, screen-hungry, Linux ports. Eventually I realised it needed to save the files automatically, and eventually I started using it on my MacBook as well. For no particularly good reason, I installed it on my girlfriend's iMac. When I caught her using it a couple of weeks later, it occured to me that actually, maybe other people would find it useful after all, and here it is. It's named after my girlfriend. Note and I sure hope you find it as useful as we do ;)

Download the files from here.

The NotePuppy forums are a quite place, you can find them here.

NotePuppy is written in C++ using the Qt libraries, and should work on most platforms, except iPhone and Android, which Qt doesn't cover. It is released under the LGPL, with the extra proviso that it should only be used for nice things.