Notebox Disorganizer.
Some information to help you live with it.
This program is called Notebox, and for that matter Disorganizer, on the grounds that my basic unit of order is the mess, which for the sake of tidiness I keep in a box. When I come across some new information of interest or utility, I make a note of it and add the note to the box. Sometimes I put the box in order. Sometimes I sort it into categorized boxes. Mostly I don't. This is all only approximately true.
In sum, ND is for people who like to keep their mess splattered all across the screen right where they can see it.
If you want to keep notes in a tidy and organized fashion, such as in a tree-view layout, into which you're obliged to tuck everything neatly away...well, this is not the program for you. Have a look at KeyNote or TreePad.
If you're still reading, I might as well run through the basics of operation. I'm disorganized, and so this page is somewhat out of date; still, it should give you some idea of who and what you're dealing with. (The documentation supplied with the program, at least, is current.)
Let's have that illustration again:
What Have We Got Here?
Examining things from the top down, we see a traditional title bar and menu bar; some sort of status line or control bar thing; a grid display such as one might see in a spreadsheet; another status bar/control bar thing; an editing window; and at the bottom a button bar. Over on the right are a couple of list boxes with drop-down menus stuck on top of them.
Let's look at all of them in order...
The Title Bar
...is a typical Windows title bar, mainly. It displays the name of the program when there's no notebox loaded, or the name of the notebox that's loaded when there is one. Over on the left is a a black and white icon that is vaguely meant to look like the ND2e window. This icon turns red when a change has been made to the notebox and back to black when the notebox is saved.
The Menu Bar
...currently sports the following options:
File Editor Note Category Tools Pop View
Follow the links if you're so inclined.
The Sort Of Tool- and Status- Bar
...is just under the Menu bar, and contains buttons, labels, and buttons that look like labels. This is generally known as poor design, but I like it.
At the far left is a button whose label indicates either the current number of notes, the total word count of all notes, the size in characters of all notes, or even nothing at all (if you so desire). Clicking the button changes the display. View|Notebox Count sets the same configuration in a different way.
To the right of that are three buttons that should look like a point-down triangle, a circle, and a point-up triangle. These control the vertical height of the rows in the grid.
To the right of those is a wide bar that frequently displays the current notebox file's pathname. It also displays a preview of the note that the mouse pointer is on top of, should the mouse pointer happen to be on top of a note. Should you happen to scroll the current note off the screen you can click this bar to bring it back into view. Middle-clicking the bar will save the current notebox file -- except possibly on Windows 95; my tests suggest that 95's stock mouse driver doesn't seem to want to pass that event along.
At the far right are three buttons that should look like a dot, a line and a box. These provide duplicate functionality for the View menu's Both-Editor-And-Grid, Editor-Only, and Grid-Only options.
The Note Grid
...displays the notes in the notebox. It sports a right-click menu that duplicates all the functionality of the Note menu, and also provides the Transfer command. (Transfer allows you to Transfer the Outbox to a specified category.)
Some notes have small triangles in their upper and/or lower right corners.
Notes that have triangles in their upper right corners are notes that have styled text in them; plain text notes lack such triangles.
Notes that have triangles in their lower right corners have more text in them than can be shown given the current size of a cell in the grid. Normally an ellipsis (...) would be used to indicate omitted text, but things got technically complicated. Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft.
You will note that although there are buttons in the sort-of-tool-and-status-bar that will change the height of the rows in the grid, thereby allowing more text but fewer notes to be seen, there is no corresponding means to change the width of the columns. There may be a reason.
I should also mention that there is a bug in the underlying grid control (not my fault!) that will cause out-of-control scrolling when you click on a partially displayed note (cell). I've made considerable efforts to minimize the size of partially displayed notes in order to make it difficult to click on them. The lack of column-sizing may be related to this, albeit perhaps for an obsolete reason.
The Other Sort Of Tool- and Status- Bar
...is much like the first.
At the far left is an informative and fascinating display of the number of words in the current note (calculated using Printer's Rule, discussed elsewhere), or its size in lines or characters, or nothing at all. Click the display to change it. The statistics are drawn with an underline when the contents of the editor are changed.
To the right of that you will see the line:column display. Press the End key when the cursor is on a word-wrapped line and watch the line:column display become inaccurate. This is Microsoft's fault. Click this display and the Find dialog will appear. Why?
To the right of that is a big wide bar that will tell you what cell you're editing in the format Category Name:Note Number. Useful if you happen to scroll the grid while editing and forget where you were, I suppose, and of course if you maximize the editor. Click this display and you can change the height of the editor relative to the height of the grid. It's a splitter! It's a splitter! Auntie Em! Auntie Em! [Never write documentation at 1:15 AM.]
And at the far right, behold! Controls that duplicate the functionality of the View menu's Show-Both, Show-Grid, Show-Editor...functions.
The Editor
...is mostly like any other editor you may run across. You get into the editor by clicking in it, or double clicking on a note, or by pressing return when a note is active in the grid. You get out of the editor by clicking on the grid, or by pressing Escape. (Arrows, Return and Escape can take you far...)
There are a few handy author's keys (although I frequently forget about them), viz:
Control-. produces an ellipsis ('...');
Control-', which would be Control-" except that Control-" was pre-empted by Microsoft, produces dialog quotes ('""') and leaves the cursor between them;
Control-- yields a double dash (' -- '). These dashes are wossname, ANSI hyphens, not ASCII hyphens, because the latter are not respected by Microsoft's word-wrap function.
Control-# (i.e. Control-Shift-3) inserts a scene break in the form of a blank line, a centered #, and another blank line.
You wouldn't believe how much frustration these features caused.
Control-1 through Control-9, in a fit of nostalgia for the One True AppleWorks (II Infinitum!), move the cursor to various fractions within the note. Unlike the One True AppleWorks, 1 and 9 do not map to the beginning and end of the text, so as not to be redundant to Control-Home and Control-End.
Control-Y, in another such fit of nostalgia, clears from the cursor to the end of the line.
There is a handy right-click context menu, also available through Shift-F10, which at this hour (01:38:14 AM) I think is self-explanatory...
...except (08:03:27 PM) for the Editorialize function. This is an indulgence on my part; it's a text color-coder intended to work as a conceptual aid to revising one's writing. For instance, if you have written something that you find unclear but don't have time to fix it, you can select it and Editorialize it as Unclear. Which is (should be) a sort of pinkish peach. At some point I should add some additional utility -- such as the ability to search for text that has been so classified. Ah well.
Just below the Format item you will find "View Raw RTF Code" -- unless you were holding down the Control and Shift keys, in which case you will find "Edit Raw RTF Code". These items will pop up the MiniEditor and allow you to change and/or see the grotty technicalities of your text. Editing raw RTF code is potentially dangerous and not recommended; the only reason I added this function is that the old-school edit control Delphi provides can't cope with some of the newfangled RTF codes, meaning that the only ways of getting rid of them were A) convert the whole text to plaintext, which wasn't acceptable, and as you might guess, B) edit the raw code. If you do choose to mess with the raw code, note that it is necessary to remove the single leading space from the first line in the minieditor (before "{\rtf") to get your changes to stick. (Said leading space is the reason the minieditor shows the codes rather then implementing them.) Both Edit and View Raw RTF Code may go away again in the future, depending on how well they work out.
Over on the right you will find the Editor Navigator, which is discussed further on.
The Button Bar
...lies below the grid and displays some self-descriptive text formatting options.
The Grid Navigator
...found to the right of the grid itself, consists of a combo-box and a listbox. The pop-down combo-box controls the contents of the listbox. Current options allow easy click-and-go (gad I hope that's not a trademark) navigation between categories, bookmarked notes, notes in the Outbox, and notes found by the Find Notes function in the Find dialog.
The skinny button in between the grid and the navigator may be clicked to hide the navigator, or dragged to change their share of space.
The Editor Navigator
...is the thing to the right of the editor, the thing with a combobox at the top and a display below that, the thing that currently offers the following functions:
# Editor Preview: less handy than having multiple editing windows on a given note, but better than nothing, this allows you to zip around the contents of your note. Click on a listed line and be zapped automagically there. Irritatingly it redraws in full while you type in the editor, which means you may have to drag its scroll bar around a lot...
# Found Lines: something of a subset of the Editor Preview; lists only those lines containing a search term from the find dialog, once you've done a Find Lines.
# Boilerplate text: After opening a given .nbx file, ND will attempt to read an accompanying .boilerplate file (e.g. Fred.nbx and Fred.boilerplate). The .boilerplate file is a simple plain-text file; each paragraph in it is listed as a separate boilerplate entry in the navigator. Click on it and it will be inserted at the cursor -- assuming there's room for it; if there isn't, you will be so informed. See Errata for more on this...
# Special: Inserts the date, the time, the date and time, the time and date, or a list of numbers, at the cursor.
# Keywords: similar to a sorted boilerplate with more specific utility, this needs to be better documented.
# Notes In This Category: can be handy if you've maximized the editor.
# Editor Scratchpad: a little editor unto itself. It has, I hope, all the functionality of the editor, except that it doesn't get saved anywhere when you quit. This may be a mistake. You can drag text into it from the editor and vice versa; hold Ctrl to make a copy instead.
The skinny button in between the editor and the navigator (control box) may be clicked to hide the navigator (control box), or dragged to resize the editor and the navigator (control box). Control box. Control box. I don't know, I just don't know.
The Tray Icon
Notebox Disorganizer IIe minimizes to the tray, where it lives with the time display. Double-click the tray icon with the primary mouse button to bring Notebox back. If you create a shortcut to ND2e with the start-minimized option selected it will tuck itself into the tray when you launch the shortcut.
Clicking the tray icon with the secondary mouse button (a.k.a. right-clicking) will display a menu. Most of the functions on said menu involve what to do with the text on the clipboard (if there is any). Also available is the Tray Pad -- which at the moment is a sort of Notepad Minus, but we have high hopes for the future.
Current Limits and Limitations
Word Count
The Notebox word count is actually a manuscript-oriented (ms format: Courier 12, unjustified, one-inch margins, nominally 250 words per page) "Printer's Rule" based approximate space count. It gives reasonably accurate results on those terms.
(Printer's Rule, as described by Geo. H. Scithers, famous editor: Set line length to 63 (so the average full-length line will be about 60 characters + spaces, equalling 10 "words") Set page length to 100 lines. Find the page number of the last page. Multiply that by 1,000 (100 lines/page, 10 words/line).)
Example: A hand-counted 3500 word text was estimated by ND as 3140 words, a 10% undercount. OpenOffice 1.0 estimated it as 2675 words, a 24% undercount. A copy of "The Eye Of Argon" that came in at 10900 words got a 4% overcount by ND and a 2% overcount by OO.
Some Semi-Insoluble Defects In This Program
Global Key Commands
Ctrl-S
In the grid
control-arrows
Ctrl-C,Ctrl-X,Ctrl-V
This is an apparently undocumented RichEdit function I discovered by accident. Not responsible if it doesn't work!
Leftovers:
Middle-click the divider to automatically resize the workspace. (What a disgusting sentence.)
Click the info bar (that's the bar that displays either the complete title of the notebox or a preview of the current note) to bring the active note into view in the grid if it's not visible.
You made it all the way down here? I'm amazed! Alas, there's nothing else to see except
THE DISCLAIMER.
The author disclaims all rights to and responsibilities for Notebox Disorganizer IIe. Use it at your own risk just like I do. This program was written for my own purposes, is a work in progress, contains suboptimal and ugly code, doubtless has bugs, and certainly has a number of idiosyncrasies. On the other hand, the appalling source code (for Delphi 2) is provided for the daring, dissatisfied, and strong-stomached. With the exception of those portions of it which are presumed copyrighted by Borland/Inprise, Notebox Disorganizer IIe is PUBLIC DOMAIN. It may be reproduced and transmitted in any form and by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, and information and retrieval systems, for any purpose, without the permission of ANYONE. You may install, use, access, display and run infinite copies of Notebox Disorganizer IIe on infinite computers (subject to the laws of physics and the nature of mathematical reality). You may reverse engineer, decompile, AND disassemble Notebox Disorganizer IIe (except the Borland/Inprise bits). Sure, you've got the source code — do it because you can. Go wild.
