Tomboy 0.15.6 Released, ~/.tomboy is no more

"Light Hearts", Copyright Ellery Armstrong, Milk Teeth Photography, Used With Permission

Yesterday I released Tomboy 0.15.6 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The biggest change is invisible to most users: we've gotten rid of ~/.tomboy.

Anybody who's backed up their notes or created Rube Goldberg-esque sync solutions is familiar with this hidden directory holding note files, user-installed add-ins, and various bits of configuration. As of today, ~/.tomboy is no more. We've separated out notes, configuration, temporary files, and even the log, and relocated them according to FreeDesktop.org standards on Linux, and appropriate conventions on Mac OS X and Windows. Everything will be automatically be moved. Details available on this wiki page.

The benefits of this move to users are:

• Users who are already trained to back up directories like ~/.config and ~/.local won't have to remember to add ~/.tomboy to that list (same argument for ~/Library on Mac OS X)
  
• Folks who want to set up their own ad-hoc note sync will now have a much easier time, because they can just sync the notes folder. Use any popular method of synchronizing a directory (rsync, iFolder, UbuntuOne, Dropbox, whatever), and combine that with our NoteDirectoryWatcher add-in, and you should be good to go. You'll miss some benefits of our sync infrastructure, like conflict handling, but you'll gain one big feature missing from Tomboy: automatic synchronization.

If you maintain some tool that expects Tomboy note files to live in ~/.tomboy, please update it to also look in (by default) ~/.local/share/tomboy. Thanks!

In the previous release I cleaned up the Search UI according to input from Andreas and Kalle at GCDS:

The original Search UI: Pretty with a lot of wasted space and one useless feature (click for full window)

The updated Search UI: Cleaner, lest wasted space (click for full window)

Other changes since the last time I blogged:

• New underline formatting add-in from Mark Wakim
  
• Keyboard shortcuts for changing font size
  
• Improvements to HTML export
  
• Less command line output unless you run Tomboy with --debug (this actually has a positive impact on performance, by the way)
  
• Add "Get More Add-Ins..." button in the Preferences UI
  
• In SSH sync, we no longer force port 22 if no port is specified

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