g j o t s By Bob Hepple, Brisbane Queensland Australia Version 0.8 If you like this program, please send me an email - then I'll be much more motivated to improve it! bhepple@freeshell.org http://bhepple.freeshell.org/gjots Sad but necessary guarantee - I hereby promise not to mis-use your email details - I won't put you on a mailing list and I won't sell or provide your address to any other party, blah blah
gjots is a fairly simple but very lightweight (fast) jotter application for your desktop. Why do we need yet another jotter program? Well, when my faithful old Psion-5 organiser died I needed to move all my bits and pieces onto Linux and I started to look around for software to fill that need. I found lots of software for diary (ical is good and an old friend, but I might look at gnome-pim) and I already wrote a beaut calculator (gdcalc) but somehow nothing was quite right for the jotter. Other packages that I looked at were either: * much too simplistic (eg. a single level hierarchy), * too complex (too many components like Corba, SQL or suchlike) * web based * unable to display & work on the tree at the same time as the text entries * too messy - throwing windows up like 3M yellow stickers all over the screen Then there were the ones I couldn't get to work or which just plain bombed. There are many fine packages around and kjots seems to be the best of the lot but none really suited my needs. Anyhow, I needed to learn how to do GTK trees and so here we are. Like Goldilocks said about the chairs, porridge and beds, gjots is "just right".
gjots is developed on RedHat Linux 7.3 for i386 but should run on any RPM-based Linux. It uses gtk+1.2 which is pretty well universal at the moment. ccrypt (http://ccrypt.sourceforge.net/) is needed for working with encrypted files. Please advise of success in running on any other platform: debian? slackware? sparc? other hw?
Easiest is from a binary rpm and then you don't need to think about it (provided you are using an Intel ix86-based Linux that can install RPM's). Otherwise if installing from the tarball by hand there is only a single binary to install, namely gjots, and the gjots2html, docbook2gjots and gjots2docbook scripts which should go somewhere on your $PATH, perhaps /usr/local/bin The documentation file readme.gjots can go in /usr/share/doc/gjots-0.X and the man pages gjots.1, gjots2html, docbook2gjots.1 and gjots2docbook.1 should go somewhere that man(1) can find it, perhaps /usr/local/man/man1 or /usr/share/man/man1
The usual. From the tar ball do: ./configure glade -w gjots.glade make make install Also, rpm builds should work too if working from a source rpm. gjots was written with glade so you will need this to hack on it.
Bug fixes are very welcome! If anyone wants to translate this into another language please get in touch and I will provide an internationalised version and message catalogs. I will incorporate any new features that people want to contribute provided I like them too. If you want to add something to the mainstream development please drop me a line first and I will make sure no-one else is working on that area. Please use diff -ru to create the patch, and send it as a gzipped file attachment. If I choose not to incorporate your favourite feature, feel free to fork the development but please choose a different name for the program. This is GPL code after all. Note that to protect the GPL license I will need to include your name and email address in the Authors and License section. If you want to contribute please get in touch with Robert Hepple <bhepple@freeshell.org>, to make sure work is not duplicated. For general ideas, please see "Planned Features".
Just start it as "gjots" - it will save anything in $HOME/.gjotsfile Or use an argument - gjots accepts a single file, eg: gjots todo.gjots The usual gnome options are available plus: --help Prints the standard gnome help items. -g, --geometry WIDTHxHEIGHT[+X+Y] Initial window geometry for gjots. Note that the X and Y components are presently ignored. -p, --prefs filename Use filename as the preferences file for gjots in stead of the default ($HOME/.gjotsrc) -r, --readonly Open file in readonly mode (does no locking)
Open and save do the usual and operate on gjots-format text files (see below). Unless readonly mode is in effect, gjots will create a lockfile to enforce single-writer but allow multiple readers. If a file is opened while it is already locked then a popup window will offer "Try Again" or "Readonly". The "Try Again" option allows you to exit the program which is locking the file. The lock file is a simple file called .#filename, where filename is the name of the gjots file being edited. It is in the same directory as the original gjots file and it contains just the process identifier (pid) of the locking process. If the locking process dies without cleaning up the lockfile then gjots can detect it on the next open. Thus, locking is viable even on an NFS mounted volume. File opened "readonly" have no locking applied. There is a menu item under "Files" which allows the readonly status of the program to be toggled. It also takes care of locking and unlocking the file as above. When gjots saves a file it moves any prior version of the file to a backup in the manner of emacs ie. if saving to "file.gjots" which already exists, the old version would get saved to "file.gjots~" If your filename ends in ".cpt", gjots will attempt to decrypt and encrypt the file using ccrypt(1). If ccrypt is not installed (it is not a standard part of all Linux distributions) the IO will fail. Install ccrypt for good security!
The screen has a menubar and toolbar at the top which should be fairly self-explanatory. The toolbar on the left controls the tree hierarchy. Just play around with it and you'll soon get the hang of it. "Promote Items" makes the current item(s) into children of their grandparent. "Demote Items" makes the current items(s) into children of the sibling immediately before them. When a folder loses all of its items it gets automatically demoted to a plain item. A right button click on a tree item pops up a menu of operations. The 'Options' button pops up the Preferences dialog. The 'Wrap' button formats the current paragraph according to the line length set in the preferences dialog (also activated by ^L) The 'Ext.Ed' button invokes an external editor according to the command string in the Preferences dialog. The default string is "xterm -e vi %s' - the %s is replaced by the temporary filename. Any other editor can be used as long as it can accept a filename as an argument. The 'Date' button puts a date stamp into the file at the current position. The 'Find' button pops up the find & replace dialog.
F6 or the Find button in the top toolbar popup the find & replace dialog. The operation should be intuitive - type in what you want to find into the Find & Replace dialog Find entry and press the Find button. To replace one occurance put the new text in the Replace entry box and press the Replace button. The program will search forward and replace the text. To replace all occurances (from the current position to the end of file) press the Replace All button. The Close and Cancel button both hide the find dialog - the close button saves any new settings for future use (except for the Find and Replace strings). The Clear button just clears the Find & Replace entries. Any errors appear both in the area immediately below the button and also in the main program status bar. Options appear below the Find & Replace buttons and include "Match Case" to limit the search to the same upper and lower case. "Global" is the default and allows the search to take place across the whole file. The alternative is to limit the search to the current item. "Regular Expression" permits the use of POSIX Extended Regular Expressions as defined in "man 7 regex" (ie as used in egrep). A quick reference to regular expressions: . any character ^ start of line (only as the first item in the RE) $ end of line (only as the last item in the RE) * zero or more repetitions of the previous RE + one or more repetitions of the previous RE ? zero or one repetitions of the previous RE {n} exactly n repetitions of the previous RE {n,} n or more repetitions of the previous RE {n,m} n to m repetitions of the previous RE [ ] matches any character in the set. Ranges are eg. [a-z] [^ ] matches any character not in the set ( ) forms a 'remembered' pattern | pattern alternation eg. x|y means "matches x or y" \n n is 1 to 9 - a backreference to a previous pattern Special matches inside [..] brackets: [:alnum:] matches any alphanumeric [:alpha:] matches any alphabetic [:blank:] matches any blank (space or TAB) [:cntrl:] matches any control character [:digit:] matches any digit 0-9 [:graph:] matches any printable except space [:lower:] matches any lowercase [:print:] matches any printable including space [:punct:] matches any punctuation (not space or alphanumeric) [:space:] matches any whitespace (space TAB \f \n \r \v) [:upper:] matches any uppercase [:xdigit:] matches any hex digit [:<:] matches any beginning of word [:>:] matches any end of word Thus \.[[:alnum:]] matches a full stop followed by an alphanumeric. To match one of the 'magic' characters ^.[$()|*+?{\ escape it with \ For the replacement pattern the following sequences are available: \& paste the entire found string \1..\9 paste the nth found sub-pattern (defined with (...) ) \U uppercase the rest of the substitution \L lowercase the rest of the substitution \u uppercase the next character \l lowercase the next character \n insert a newline \Q quote (ie ignore magic value of \) until \E \E stops upper/lower case and quoting
The following items can be selected as preferences and will be remembered in the startup file '~/.gjotsrc': Text line length - used in paragraph formating, (65) External Editor - editor to use with the Ext.Ed. button (xterm -e vi %s) Date format - format string to feed to strftime(3) for use in date stamp. Do a "man strftime" for details. (%F) e.g.: %F : 2002-11-03) %c : Sun 03 Nov 2002 10:33:22 AM EST (%d %b %y) : (03 Nov 02) Font - the font to be used for the text display. The controls and tree still use the default GTK font. (-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1) I personally prefer: -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal-*-*-110-*-*-m-*-iso8859-1
Most of the key shortcuts are the usual. In the text display, the normal emacs key mappings apply: ^a, home goto start of line ^e, end goto end of line ^b, left move back one place ^f, right move forward one place Alt-b, ^left move one word left Alt-f, ^right move one word right ^n, down move to next line ^p, up move to previous line ^home/end goto start/end of text ^k delete to end of line ^d, delete delete one char ^h, b/s delete one char backwards Alt-d delete word ^L paragraph re-format or "wrap" Shift and <move> mark the region. Plus the following work: ^x cut ^c copy ^v paste ^w delete one word backwards Key mappings in the tree: In general, plain keys just move around the tree. Control keys manipulate the tree. up goto previous item down goto next item ^up move the current item(s) up the tree ^down move the current item(s) down the tree shift-up/down extend the selection left ascend the tree right descend the tree ^left promote items ^right demote items home goto to the first item at the present level end goto to the last item at the present level ^home goto the very first item ^end goto the very last (expanded) item ^c copy ^x, delete cut ^v, insert paste (note: does NOT over-write) Global key mappings: ^s does save ^q does quit F6 Popup the find dialog Shift-F6 Find next F12 moves between tree and text
You can bring data in and out of gjots using the import and export functions. These operate on the currently selected item so you can control exactly what gets saved. The format of the file is the normal gjots format.
Just the same as kjots but with a hierarchy: \NewEntry title1 this is the stuff that goes into title1 \NewFolder \NewEntry title2 this is title2's stuff \NewEntry title3 title 3's stuff \EndFolder The \keywords need to be at the start of the line to be recognised.
gjots can encrypt and decrypt files using the ccrypt(1) package. gjots prompts for passwords where needed. Make sure you have ccrypt installed if you want to use this feature.
For encryption, I've used the equivalent of: {write cleartext} | KEYWORD=password ccencrypt -E KEYWORD >filename.cpt This exposes the password briefly as an environment parameter although it is 'scrubbed' and removed from the gjots process environment immediately after use. According to the ccrypt man page, "on most modern systems" the ps command protects environment parameters from ordinary users. Under Linux, you can 'cat /proc/PID/environ' to see the environment parameters of any process that you own - only root can spy on another's environment so using -E is no less secure than your login password and root's login password. The only other way to do this (AFAICS) would be: {write cleartext} >file.gjot echo password |ccencrypt -k - file.gjot ... while this provides better protection for the password, this (briefly) exposes the cleartext as a file - as bad as or worse than exposing the key as an environment parameter! Decrypting is much easier - I use stdin to pass in the password: echo password |ccdecrypt -c -k - filename.cpt | {read from pipe} A supplementary channel (eg. stdin=0, stdout=1 stderr=3 stdpasswd=3) for ccrypt to read passwords would be a better solution (but ccrypt does not provide it).
gjots2html converts a gjots file into HTML together with a table of contents which looks remarkably like the subject tree. See the man page for more details.
converts a gjots file into DOCBOOK XML format. See the man page for more details.
Converts DOCBOOK XML into gjots - see the man page for full details See the man page for more details.
This is very much a beta release. It undoubtedly has bugs so save often. In case of doubt the prior version is available as "file.gjots~" If you have ideas on how to improve gjots, please email me. If you like the program, please let me know otherwise I will never know if anyone is using it!
If lots of people email me and say they like it then I might be motivated to add more features. What gets added will be limited to the design goal of "very fast and lightweight", but might include: gjots ===== Help page - probably fire this up in gjots! Add timestamp to every item & display in appbar when selected adopt default file extension - .gjots? drag & drop items!!! autosort on/off for folders close all / open all folders Edit->Clear, Properties, Settings->preferences autosave Support for item options: \Options including: open/closed para details ...? Move to gtk-2 when it becomes more all-pervasive. gjots2html ========== Increase number of levels to max supported by HTML (9?) Add options: -r N, --rule=N: <HR> for all levels up to N -n, --no-toc: suppress table of contents -t title: Provide centered title before toc
None known, of course, other than: I would be particularly interested in knowing just how I can get hold of the button-3 popup menu widgets (so that I can disable the Paste function until there is something to paste). When gjots starts up, the tree display is sometimes garbled. It can be cleared by closing and re-opened the root, but why does it happen? The cut buffer is implemented as a plaintext temporary file and is therefore a possible security hole - although the file is not visible in the file system (it is opened and immediately unlinked so gjots is the only program that can read or write it). Probably not a real problem. Inappropriate error messages if can't open a gjots file on initial startup
Presently only tested on RH Linux 7.3 i386 This uses the full GNU autoconf/automake package so should be fairly portable. If you want to port to another platform please let me know so I can eliminate duplication of effort (and give due credit!)
Mostly written by : Robert Hepple <bhepple@freeshell.org>, 2002. The paragraph wrapping code is lifted (under the GPL) from Sylpheed 0.7.6 by Hiroyuki Yamamoto <yamamoto@good-day.co.jp> and adapted for gjots by Robert Hepple, 2002. Logo by DSP Popeck - wokoglopulator@yahoo.com
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