Repo Review: Gnote

by Cg Boy

Looking for an easy way to capture your thoughts in a digital note? Out of the various note taking applications in the PCLinuxOS repository, I have chosen to review one called Gnote because I personally prefer it to some of the others.

The interface is simple and nicely designed. On the left are the notebooks, which can have notes assigned to them. Notes can also be marked as important, and will then appear in the Important notebook. And on the right are the note entries themselves. To add new notes, just click the + button in the top left corner. To delete notes you have to right click on them and select Delete. You can also search for notes.

Creating new notes is really easy. You can set a few formatting options like font size, bold, italic, underline, etc, and you can also create bullet lists. One cool feature of Gnote is that you can add links to other notes by selecting some text and then clicking Link to New Note in the menu. Also, if you just type the name of an existing note, it will automatically create a link to it. Now, in the manual for Gnote, it says that there's a spell checker, but for some reason, when I used Gnote there was no spell checking. I'm not sure why. Gnote does also have the ability to print notes.

Gnote can be set to synchronize your notes to either a local folder, or a WebDav server. You can set it to automatically synchronize every 10 (or any number you choose) minutes.

Gnote comes with a number of plugins that can be enabled. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to try them all out for this review. There are plugins for exporting notes as HTML, adding a table of contents to notes, inserting a timestamp, and various others that I just didn't have the time to test. Sorry.

Summary

Compared to a few other note taking applications in the PCLinuxOS repository, I found that I liked the simplicity of Gnote a lot. If all you need is a simple way of writing down your thoughts, Gnote is a pretty good choice.