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The Tools Menu

...contains Display File Statistics, Show Debug Messages, Pin Note, Go To Pinned, Selection <-> Outbox, Duplicate Outbox Here, Move Outbox Here, SynchroNote-ize Outbox, DeSynchroNote-ize Outbox, Colorize Outbox, Clear the Outbox, Destroy Outboxed Notes, Navigator -> Outbox, Rearrange Categories, Rearrange Notes in this Category, Edit Row Labels, Edit Category Names, Edit Keywords, Edit Boilerplate, Plaintextify Notebox, Associate Notebox Filetypes, and Set Preferences.

Show Debug Messages frequently shows nothing of interest. If you're in the process of helping me debug ND it may show a great deal of nothing of interest.

Display File Statistics shows a summary of the current notebox -- number of notes, total size, word count...and anything else I may have thought to add -- for example, the date and time that your version of ND was finalized (you should pardon the expression).

Pin Note and Go To Pinned are a complementary pair that are functionally similar to Bookmarking, only a bit quicker and more limited. Do a Pin Note and the current note will become pinned, which means that invoking Go To Pinned will take you back to it from elsewhere in the grid.

Selection <-> Outbox exists for the benefit of keyboard-oriented people. Normally you click and drag in the grid to select a range of notes that will then be added to the outbox (or removed from the outbox if they were already in it). You achieve that end from the keyboard by using Shift in conjunction with the arrow keys to establish a provisional selection, which you then commit to with the F12 key (or press Alt-T(ools), arrow down to Selection <-> Outbox, press Return). It makes more sense if you see it happening.

Duplicate Outbox Here and Move Outbox Here will copy or move (respectively) all the notes in the Outbox to the current category at the current note position, pushing existing notes down to make room as needed.

SynchroNote-ize Outbox and DeSynchronote-ize Outbox turn all the notes in the Outbox into SynchroNotes, or stop them being SynchroNotes, respectively.

Colorize Outbox allows you to set custom colors for notes in the grid, if you feel the need. Another useless function.

Clear the Outbox clears the Outboxed status of all the notes in the Outbox.

Destroy Outboxed Notes removes all Outboxed notes from the Notebox. Not to be confused with Clear the Outbox. Maybe this menu item should be farther away from, er, any other menu item...

Navigator -> Outbox...well, you see the Grid Navigator on the upper right of the display? The thing that displays Categories, Bookmarks, Found Notes and suchlike? If you click and drag on notes listed there, and select this function, those selected notes will be put in the Outbox. Whee. (If there's no selection, all the notes listed will be put in the Outbox.)

Rearrange Categories and Rearrange Notes in this Category will pop up dialogs that will allow you to rearrange the order of categories in the notebox and the order of notes in the current category, respectively. You can move the current selection up and down either by clicking the Up and Down triangles or by pressing Ctrl-Up and Ctrl-Down, and establish a new selection with click-and-drag or Shift-Up and Shift-Down.

Edit Row Labels, Edit Category Names, Edit Keywords and Edit Boilerplate all pop up mini-editors that will let you change the related information.

Plaintextify Notebox, as suggested earlier, discards any styled text found anywhere in the notebox. Underlines and suchlike things are nice but take up a lot of space on disk; you may under some circumstances want to do away with all formatting. This action is not undoable. Actually, hardly anything is undoable in ND. Sad, isn't it?

Associate Notebox Filetypes will, or at least should, enable the double-clicking of notebox (.nbx) and exploded notebox (.nbe) files to start up ND and load the relevant notebox. If this item is dimmed either you've already associated filetypes or Windows is being uncooperative.

Set Preferences displays a Preferences dialog as commonly seen in the world. Various options are available; let's run through them...

At top left you will find the automatic save options ("Save named files", meaning that newly-created as-yet-unnamed files will not be automatically saved). Select "Manually" if you don't want autosaving and would rather press Control-S frequently. "After each change" means save immediately after you make changes in the editor and then exit the editor (editor changes are not committed until you exit the editor). This is probably the best option by some standards of safety, but since I found it irritating on slow disks I added the "[] seconds after last change" option. The "On exit" box exists for those who have selected the manual save option but don't want to get the "Do you want to save changes" dialog on exit all the time.

(It may be worth mentioning at this point that ND saves .nbx files in a multistep process -- 1) the notebox is is saved under a new randomly-generated filename; 2) if the temporary file was successfully saved, the original file is deleted and 2a) the new file is renamed to the original name. On the other hand, when saving an .nbe file the process is slightly different -- 1) the master folder is renamed; 2) a new master folder is saved; if the save was successful, 3) the original folder is destroyed. In case you wondered.)

Below the auto-save options lie the cell-coloring options. There are four kinds of notes defined: Normal, Active, Selected, and Bookmark(ed). Normal notes are those that are, well, otherwise unformatted. The Active note is the one that is currently being displayed in the editor. Selected notes are the ones that are in the Outbox. Bookmark(ed) notes are, of course, bookmarked. (Note that Bookmarked notes are displayed not only in your choice of colors but sport centered text in the grid. Just thought I'd mention it.) You can change the colors either by clicking the color swatches as indicated and using the resulting color dialog, or by entering hexadecimal color codes in the edit boxes (e.g. #000000 for black and #FFFFFF for white). (There was a reason for providing those edit boxes, but I can't remember what it was.)

On the right-hand side are miscellaneous options. Currently there are six checkboxes to start with:

  1. Find editor's selected text: if you want said text to be auto-inserted in the Find dialog for some reason.
  2. Count categories from zero: you'll note that the categories are numbered, much as the rows are. I had a request that they should be countable from 0, hence this checkbox. No request for counting rows from 0, so no checkbox.
  3. Ins implies Edit (swap Ins/Ctrl-Ins): normally, if you press the Ins key while in the grid a new blank note will be inserted at the current ("cursor", active note, whichever) position, pushing notes out of the way to make room for it; if you press Ctrl-Ins, you'll insert a note and be dropped into the Editor. Checking this box will invert the normal behavior.
  4. Make .bak-ups of loaded files: if you check this box and then load "fred.nbx", ND will make a copy of "fred.nbx" as "fred.nbx.bak". Any existing "fred.nbx.bak" will be destroyed. I have a "I hate to lose data" mindset. But I still make no promises...
  5. Auto Reopen Last Loaded: keeps track of the file that you were working on and saves its name when you exit, and then automatically reopens it the next time you start the program.
  6. Note Preview: arrows instead of mouse: in the View menu, yet to be discussed, there are various Note Preview options. These are designed to let you mouse around the grid and see what's in other notes without having to exit the one you're currently working on. This checkbox causes the current note to be displayed as a preview. This is useful in case you a) are working in grid-only mode and b) hate the mouse and just want to arrow around. If you have this box checked and find yourself missing the mouse-around capacity, hold the Ctrl key down while moving the mouse pointer around the grid.

After the checkboxes are three combo boxes:

[1a] After Duplicating the Outbox...

[1b] ...then...

and

[2] After Moving the Outbox...

These allow customizing the behavior of the Move and Duplicate functions found in the Tools menu. For instance, if you Duplicate the Outbox, should the newly duplicated notes appear in the Outbox? If they're genuine duplicates, you'd expect this to be the case, but it can be annoying. For that matter, what about the originals? Most of the time you won't want them in the Outbox after you've moved or duplicated them, but maybe not always. Configure your preferred options here -- always ask what to do, always add, never add, always remove, etc.

Finally come the Cancel and Update buttons. Cancel is obvious; maybe Update should be "OK" instead. I don't know. Do you know? Why is it always 4:58 AM when I'm doing this?

That's Tools. What's next?

Copr. 2007 R. Forrest Hardman