Provided by: wmpinboard_1.0.1-1_amd64 
NAME
wmpinboard - a Window Maker dock app resembling a miniature pinboard
SYNOPSIS
wmpinboard [options]
What wmpinboard is
wmpinboard is a Window Maker dock applet resembling a miniature pinboard. It's intended to somewhat
relieve heavily littered desktops by allowing you to place reminders on a graphical on-screen pinboard
rather than producing a mess of real notes all around your keyboard (thus being environmentally A Good
Thing, too ;-) ). It supports arbitrary 6x10 X fonts and has XLocale support, enabling you to enter
locale-dependent special characters if set up appropriately. Besides text, you can add small monochrome
sketches to your notes or simply encircle or underline words as a means of emphasis, and alarms can be
set to explicitly remind you of things. Above all, wmpinboard is animated in redundant ways to make it
look even more attractive, and themeability provides for a way of adapting its appearance to that of the
rest of your desktop.
What wmpinboard ISN'T
Clearly, wmpinboard doesn't allow you to keep an unlimited number of notes holding arbitrary amounts of
information, and that's not what it's meant to do. Just as real notes offer limited space, so do those
simulated by wmpinboard. Besides, as a dock applet, it aims at being small and neat and yet useful in a
way, and that's what it is, too, or considered to be by some people, anyway. If you need room for more
comprehensive reminders, use another program, either additionally or exclusively. There's a variety of
such out there, but their niche is different from that which wmpinboard claims.
OPTIONS
wmpinboard's command-line options can be roughly divided into four groups: configuration directives, run-
time options, command-line actions, and general options. Generally, wmpinboard supports GNU-style long
options (which may be abbreviated unambiguously) as well as short ones for parameters used more commonly.
Configuration directives
This type of command-line options changes some aspect of wmpinboard's configuration that is saved along
with the data and thus set in a more permanent way. Only one such parameter may be specified per call,
and there mustn't be another instance running.
`--font=FONT'
Makes wmpinboard use the specified font; `FONT' can be one of the shortcuts listed when running the
program with "`--help'" as a parameter, or a complete X descriptor of a fixed size 6x10 font. The
pinboard must be empty in order for this option to be applicable. For more details, see the section on
"FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS".
`--theme=FILE'
Configures wmpinboard to load the specified theme when started interactively the next time. `FILE' is
the location of a wmpinboard theme file (typically with a file name extension of .wmpbtheme). If it
can't be loaded when run interactively, the program will revert to its default theme. If `FILE' is an
empty string or "default", the use of a custom theme will be deactivated.
Themes affect wmpinboard's appearance, in particular, its pinboard, edit mode and alarm panel pixmaps,
the latter's digits, and possibly the location of the pinboard mode label area (via which notes are
created). For downloading themes, or if you're inclined to create one yourself and need instructions,
check out the program's home page (see the section on "AUTHOR" or wmpinboard's "`--help'" output for
the URL). The themes kit containing instructions and samples on how to create theme files for
wmpinboard that can be downloaded there is also included with the source package of the program.
`--alarm-cmd=CMD'
Configures `CMD' as the command to be executed on alarms. E.g., you could use "`xkbbell'" to cause the
program to beep on such occassions, or make it run some sound-playing program. To reset the alarm
command to none, make `CMD' a zero-length string.
Run-time options
`-d DISPLAY' or `--display=DISPLAY'
Uses the specified X display rather than the default one.
`-c' or `--click-to-focus'
This turns on some emulation of a click-based keyboard focus mode. See the section on "FREQUENTLY ASKED
QUESTIONS".
`-t TIME' or `--timeout=TIME'
Sets the edit mode timeout (i.e., the number of seconds of idleness after which edit mode is terminated
automatically) to `TIME' seconds. The compile-time default is 60s, but this may have been changed for
your particular build; run with `-v' if in doubt to check that. Specifying a value of 0 (zero) will
disable the timeout.
`-n' or `--normal-state'
Forces wmpinboard to run in so-called NormalState, which is preferred by AfterStep's Wharf.
`-w' or `--withdrawn-state'
Forces the program to run in so-called WithdrawnState, as desired by the Window Maker dock. This
option and the previous one are mutually exclusive. Note also that wmpinboard tries to auto-detect
whether Window Maker is running and sets itself up accordingly. Using `-n' or `-w' should only be
necessary in case those heuristics fail on your system for some reason or other.
`--light'
Use this switch to suppress animations.
Command-line actions
Even though wmpinboard is by design an interactive application, there may be occasions when it comes in
handy to be able to access/manipulate notes from the command line. That's why the program offers a set
of command-line options allowing for basic operations of that kind. Still, it should be kept in mind
that wmpinboard is primarily meant to be used interactively.
All of the options below will, if an interactive instance of wmpinboard is running in the background,
cause that to save its data (and quit edit mode, if necessary), and if any changes are made by the
respective option, the interactive instance will then be signalled to re-read the data file. Even though
the implemented methods of inter-process communication should generally be sufficiently safe with respect
to avoiding data file corruption, it's in theory possible to undermine the concept and cause damage that
way--yet this won't happen unless you deliberately take pains to achieve the goal. Generally, everything
should work fine as long as you don't try running multiple non-interactive instances of wmpinboard
simultaneously.
Only one of the below actions can be specified per call to wmpinboard.
`--dump'
This dumps the contents of all notes, replacing line breaks by spaces (unless preceded by a hyphen) and
shortening sequences of blanks. The list of dumped strings will be sorted by color groups. If you use
special characters in your notes, make sure your terminal's running with the same character set as
wmpinboard, or what you'll see might have a garbage-like quality.
Each line of output represents one note and is prefixed by the internal number currently identifying
the respective note and, if an alarm is configured for the respective note, time and date (or "daily").
`--dump-raw'
Unlike the "cooked" dump described above, this just dumps the raw contents of all notes without
applying any kind of formatting. May come in handy if your notes happen to contain E-mail addresses or
other things for which lines 10 characters wide are too narrow.
`--del=NUMBER'
This option will remove the note identified by `NUMBER' from the pinboard. `NUMBER' is a number
determined by the output of either dump option, which should be consulted right before using this one,
since note numbers may change when notes are moved around on the board or others are removed.
`--add=STRING'
When run with this option, wmpinboard will add a new note (provided the maximal number of notes has not
yet been reached) at a random position on the board, with contents `STRING', word-wrapping the text at
the end of the note's lines where necessary (after white space and hyphens). If due to this wrapping,
the entire string cannot be stored on the note, the remainder will be discarded silently.
In order to create a note with a certain color, the string can be prefixed by a color code specifying
the group of colors which a random color is to be selected from (code letters are recognized case-
insensitively):
%G - green
%Y - yellow/white
%R - reddish
%B - blue
Alternatively or additionally, you may specify a position code as "%1" through "%9", defining an
approximate position on the board where the note is to be placed. Each of the nine figures corresponds
to a ninth of the board with its index assigned in accordance with the layout of your keypad (i.e.,
"%1" meaning lower left, "%9" upper right corner, and so forth).
Thus,
wmpinboard --add '%g%5test'
will place a green note saying "test" at the center of the board.
(Note: The "%" character can be escaped by a second one if you want to add an un-prefixed string
starting with a percent character.)
`--add-raw=STRING'
Via this option, a new note can be added from the command line (provided that this won't exceed the
maximum number of notes). `STRING' specifies the raw contents of the note, as printed by `--dump-raw'.
The same set of color group and position codes as for the previous option applies.
General options
`-h' or `--help'
This prints a help screen listing command line options together with brief descriptions.
`-i' or `--info'
Prints information about the current user configuration (font, theme, alarm command) and some useless
statistics.
`-v' or `--version'
This prints some more detailed version information, in particular, which compile-time settings this
binary was built with.
DESCRIPTION
wmpinboard operates in basically two different modes, namely, the pinboard view and edit mode.
Furthermore, a panel of buttons granting access to extended options can be popped up in edit mode, which
in turn allows you to display the alarm panel to configure alarm settings for the current note.
Pinboard view
This is wmpinboard's normal mode of operation. A potentially chaotic arrangement of tiny squares on a
beige-colored oblong (default theme) is meant to resemble notes pinned to a cork board. Possible actions
include:
• Add a note, by left-clicking on the board's "TO DO" label. This creates a new, blank, randomly-colored
note at a random position on the board and puts wmpinboard in edit mode (see below). If you prefer to
place a new note at a certain position before being prompted to enter its contents, this can be done by
moving the mouse cursor after having clicked on the label. This will realize the note and allow you to
drag it to a position of your choice. wmpinboard will switch to edit mode as soon as you release the
mouse button.
• Edit/view a note, by left-clicking on a note. This switches to edit mode (described below).
• Move a note, by dragging it using the right mouse button. This also raises the note in question on top
of all others. Depending on its horizontal position, the note will be tilted automatically. As a
side-effect, a single brief right-click can be used to raise a note on top of overlapping ones without
moving it.
By dragging a note with the left mouse button, you can move it without changing its level with respect
to other notes, i.e., without raising it on top of all others.
Edit mode
This mode serves two purposes: on the one hand, it presents you with a "full-size" view of a note's
contents, on the other, you can use the occasion to edit it. Due to its limited size, a note can hold up
to 10 characters on 6 lines (minus one on the last, i.e., 59 characters altogether), plus a monochrome
sketch of some kind. Possibly actions:
• Enter text. wmpinboard supports user-selectable fonts and dead keys, so you should be able to enter
any characters that are usually accessible via your keyboard and have them displayed correctly.
Furthermore, the cursor can be moved around using the arrow keys (or EMACS-style via
[Ctrl]-[N]/[P]/[F]/[B], if you are so inclined). Alternatively, it can be placed explicitly by left-
clicking where you want it to be. Other special keys that are supported include:
[PgUp]/[PgDn]
Places the cursor on character 1/59, respectively.
[Home]/[End]
Places the cursor at the textual start or end of the current line.
[Del]
Deletes the character currently under the text cursor and shifts the remaining text on the current
line to the left; if the current line is blank, removes it and shifts all lines below up by one line.
[Backspace]
See [Del], but affects the character on the left of the cursor.
[Ins]
Toggles inserting/overwriting of existing text; the current mode is indicated by a cursor change
(block cursor means insert mode).
[Enter]
In insert mode, wraps the current line at the cursor's position; in overwrite mode (underscore
cursor), merely moves the cursor to the start of the next line.
[Ctrl]-[Y], -[Z]
Removes an entire (intermediate) line, shifting those below up by one, and places the cursor at the
start of the current line.
[Esc]
Quits edit mode and returns to the pinboard view.
[Shift]-[Left]/[Right]
Cycles through all notes currently on the pinboard.
[Shift]-[Up]/[Down]
Cycles through all notes that are roughly the same color as the current one. For this purpose,
colors have internally been divided into four groups: green, white/yellow, reddish, blue.
([Shift]-)[Tab]
Cycles (backwards) through availabe note colors.
• Cut'n'paste text. Despite the limitations implied, wmpinboard has support for cutting & pasting to and
from the X clipboard:
• In order to copy text to the clipboard, select the desired segment via either the left or the right
mouse button: the left one will copy the text post-formatted as done by the command line switch
`--dump' (see the section on "OPTIONS"); the right button will copy the raw selection. Similarly, a
left double click will select the word (i.e., all adjoining non-blank characters) at the respective
position, a right one will do the same but neglect line breaks as delimiters. Additionally, you can
copy a note's entire raw contents by pressing [Ctrl]-[R]; [Ctrl]-[C] will do the same with applied
post-formatting.
• To paste the clipboard's contents, press the middle button wherever the insertion is supposed to
happen. This will insert the clipboard's current contents, trying to word-wrap the text (at white
space and after hyphens). If in insert mode, following text will be shifted towards the end of the
note, trying to word-wrap that as well.
If you wish to paste something without word-wrapping (e.g., an URL containing a hyphen), paste it via
[Ctrl]-[I] (think [i]nsert). This will paste the clipboard's raw contents at the current location of
the cursor, shifting subsequent text if in insert mode (not trying to word-wrap that either).
Obvious limitations you should be aware of include:
• As is usually the case (about wmpinboard, anyway), size matters. As you know, a note can hold only
up to 59 characters, so trying to paste longer strings will result in those being truncated.
• If the text to be pasted is formatted in some way or other, this won't be the case any more after it
has been pasted: wmpinboard replaces new line characters by blanks and, when pasting using the mouse,
tries to word-wrap text.
• The information stored in the cut buffer needn't necessarily be compatible with wmpinboard in that it
may be encoded with another character set.
• Leave edit mode. This is achieved by left-clicking on the triangle in the lower right-hand side
corner. If the note is completely empty, it will be removed from the board. In any case, this returns
to the pinboard view.
• Pop up a panel with some further options to choose from. This is done by right-clicking on the
aforementioned triangle. To learn what the panel is there for, see the corresponding section below.
• Draw a sketch. This mode can be activated via the panel, and deactivated by either right-clicking
somewhere on the note or opening the panel again. While in drawing mode, the mouse pointer is pencil-
shaped, and drawing can be done by keeping the left mouse button pressed and dragging the mouse, just
as you'd expect. Sketch and text may overlap each other, but keyboard input is ignored while in
drawing mode.
• Erase a sketch. Just like DRAWing mode, this mode is entered via the panel, and can be quit just like
the former. In erase mode, the text is hidden, so you needn't guess whether a pixel belongs to an
entered character or a drawn sketch. Note that the erase cursor's point is slightly larger than the
one used when drawing.
Note: wmpinboard remembers where you left the text cursor after you last edited a note and restores this
position when you edit it the next time.
Edit mode panel
This panel is intended to provide easy access to some options affecting edit mode or the current note in
general. The panel looks like this (letters denoting the buttons for reference below):
+---+---+---+---+
⎪ a ⎪ c ⎪ e ⎪ g ⎪
+---+---+---+---+
⎪ b ⎪ d ⎪ f ⎪ h ⎪
+---+---+---+---+
The buttons bear tiny icons which are meant to suggest what they do, which isn't all that easy on a 12x12
pixels area. `:^)'
Here's a description of what each button does:
(a) Left-clicking on this button opens and closes the alarm panel (see below), which allows you to
configure alarm settings for the note being edited. When the alarm panel is visible, the alarm is
activated. To turn it off, press the button again and make the panel disappear.
(b) This button allows one to cycle through all colors available for notes (20 of them). Clicking on it
won't close the panel, so this can be done repeatedly. Using the left mouse button traverses the
colors in ascending, using the right button in descending order. Note: colors can also be changed
via a keyboard shortcut in edit mode (see that section).
(c) This button closes the panel and returns to edit mode, with the sketch-drawing feature enabled (see
above).
(d) Closes the panel and returns to edit mode, with the sketch-erasing feature enabled (see above).
Don't panic if entered text vanishes all of a sudden when you do this: this is because wmpinboard
intentionally hides it to eradicate the need for you to make wild guesses as to what's entered text
and which pixels belong to a sketch.
(e) This button removes all entered text on the current note and places the text cursor on the very first
character. Besides, it closes the panel, thus returning to edit mode.
(f) Pressing this button completely removes a drawn sketch on the current note and returns to edit mode.
(g) This option removes the *entire* note from the board and returns to pinboard view.
(h) This button merely closes the panel (and thus puts you back in edit mode). The same can be achieved
by simply right-clicking in this view.
Alarm panel
This panel can be accessed from the edit mode panel described above. If the panel is visible while the
edit mode panel is on, the alarm is set, otherwise, it's disabled.
The alarm panel consists of six distinct clickable areas. The digits to the left and right of the colon
are the hour and minute which an alarm is to be set for. Below them, a date can be specified in month,
day order. On the right, there are two toggle buttons (which can be either green (on) or red (off) and
are mutually exclusive). The top one represents a daily alarm whereas the bottom one indicates/sets a
date-specific one.
The hour, minute, month, and day of month fields can each be incremented or decremented by left- or
right-clicking on them, respectively. Clicking on one of the toggle buttons configures the alarm as the
respective type.
As the above description implies, there are two distinct kinds of alarms: daily and date-specific ones.
Alarms are generally executed only when in pinboard view and not moving any notes about. If you're
keeping the program busy at the time an alarm would have to occur, it will be delayed until you're
finished (i.e., let the program return to idle pinboard view). The same holds if an alarm occurs while
another one is running.
If all prerequisites are given and an alarm becomes due, the corresponding note is displayed in edit
view, and the display starts to flash on and off, along with the alarm command being executed (see the
section on "OPTIONS"). To stop the blinking, click on the note. From then on, the note will be in edit
mode.
For daily alarms, the entered date is ignored, and as the name suggests, they're run every day at the
specified time. To deactivate such an alarm, you have to open the edit mode panel and click button (a)
to make the alarm panel disappear, which turns the alarm off.
In contrast, date-specific alarms are executed only once, at the specified day and time. Since a year
cannot be specified (explicitly), the alarm will be run on this date's next occurrence within a year from
when the alarm was set. After that, the alarm will automatically be disabled. If a date-specific alarm
becomes due while wmpinboard isn't running, it will be displayed as soon as the program is started the
next time--which does not go for daily alarms.
The default mode for alarms is date-specific, and time and date are initialized with the next full hour
when the alarm panel is opened the first time for a given note.
Internally, alarm times are stored in universal format, i.e., if you change the time zone after having
set an alarm, the time will stay universally the same but will differ relative to the new time zone from
what absolute time you originally set. This behavior is intended.
Finally, it should be mentioned that there are a few limitations with respect to command line actions
(such as `--add', `--del', `-i', etc.). See the section on "RESTRICTIONS".
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
• Q: Is a "pinboard" this small really of any use?
A: Of course the limited size imposes certain restrictions, but if you think about it, you'll agree
that a real life pinboard reminds you of things by the mere existence of notes being pinned to it. In
order to read what they say, you have to step close and, possibly, detach the note.
Quite similarly, wmpinboard reminds you of things by facing you with colored representations of notes
on your screen. To find out what it was you intended them to remind you of, all you have to do is
click on a note, which will then be displayed full size. Furthermore, the alarm feature introduced in
a later version allows for even more explicit reminders and thus renders wmpinboard even more powerful
in a way than any real-life cork board. `:-)'
By choosing from a variety of possible colors, you can assign particular colors to certain kinds of
reminders, which may further enhance wmpinboard's usability. Moreover, you can place certain notes on
certain areas of the board to emphasize their category, urgency, etc. It's up to you what to make of
it.
Finally, by adding drawing capabilities, I've definitely overcome the contents quantity barrier imposed
by the maximum number of 59 characters, for as everyone knows, a picture is worth more than a thousand
words. *grin*
• Q: I don't live in an English-speaking country, so what about extended characters (umlauts, accents,
cyrillic alphabet)?
A: wmpinboard allows you to use an arbitrary 8bit X font, provided that its characters are of a fixed
size of 6x10 (or, deprecated but possible, anything <= 7x10) pixels. The default font is "6x10" (more
precisely, it's called "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-*-ISO8859-1"), an ISO8859-1
(Latin1) font which should be part of every XFree installation.
In order to make wmpinboard use another font, run it as
$ wmpinboard --font=FONT
where FONT is either a shortcut for a compiled-in font name (see the section on "OPTIONS" for a list of
those) or a valid, complete X font descriptor. This is a configuration directive, meaning that no
other instance of wmpinboard may be running at the time. Note that this only works if there are no
more notes on the board. It's intentionally been made impossible to change the font while there are
notes saved in wmpinboard's data file, since this might result in garbage being displayed. Of course
even a font specified via a shortcut has to exist on your system in order to be usable.
If a configured custom font cannot be loaded or has invalid dimensions, wmpinboard will try to revert.
Note that this won't affect the font name saved along with the data, though.
• Q: How can I disable those vexing, superfluous animations?
A:
$ wmpinboard --light
• Q: Why aren't those animations smooth all of the time? Sometimes it looks like they're being skipped
entirely.
A: This presumably is a multitasking issue: depending on the current system load and wmpinboard's/the X
server's recent CPU usage history, it may take a moment until the scheduling has been adapted to the
suddenly increased CPU load implied by displaying the animation, and short as it is, it may already be
finished until this has happened, i.e., it's the X server lagging behind in updating the program's
display if wmpinboard's been idle for some time prior to that. It may sound paradoxical, but the
effect is the more likely to show the lower the system's load is. I don't see a way to avoid this
effect--either this, or you turn off animations altogether.
• Q: When I leave wmpinboard idle in edit mode for some time, edit mode is terminated automatically. Is
that intended?
A: Yes. After 60 idle seconds (that's the default; see the section on "OPTIONS") in edit mode (no
mouse click and no keyboard input), edit mode is terminated automatically. If the note being edited
happens to be blank, it will be discarded (or removed if an existing note is being edited).
This timeout can, however, be adjusted according to your preferences or turned off using the `-t'
parameter. See the section on "OPTIONS" for this.
• Q: When does wmpinboard save its data?
A: Notes data is saved on each of these occasions:
• whenever edit mode is terminated
• when you switch notes in edit mode (via [Shift]-[arrow key])
• when a note has been moved on the board
• when an interactive instance is running and you run wmpinboard from the command line, making it dump,
add, or delete notes
• when killed via SIGINT or SIGTERM and edit mode is active
Notes are saved to a file called .wmpinboarddata in your home directory (see the section on "FILES").
• Q: I've tried my best and littered the entire pinboard with quite a lot of notes. Now I can't seem to
be able to add another one.
A: There's a compile-time limit of 20 notes. I think more notes on this tiny a board really don't make
any sense.
• Q: I've explicitly configured my window manager for click-based rather than mouse-following focus, but
wmpinboard's focus follows the mouse regardless. Can I change this?
A: By default, wmpinboard actively claims the keyboard input focus (if it's in note edit mode) whenever
the pointer is moved over the application's area. Since wmpinboard is a dock applet, i.e., a withdrawn
rather than a "real" X window, it can't be assigned a focus in the same way as to the latter ones.
However, running wmpinboard with the parameter `-c' will make it emulate some sort of click-based
focusing. This means, it actively claims the keyboard focus only on these occasions:
• when a new note is created (not when you click on an existing note--you'll have to explicitly click
on the editing area to make it claim focus; this way, you can just view a note without any change to
keyboard focus)
• when you click somewhere on the text area in edit mode
Once keyboard-focused, wmpinboard will keep it until another window is explicitly focused (usually by
clicking on its title bar or border). To focus wmpinboard again when it's lost focus, you'll have to
click on its text area in edit mode. This click will only focus the application and not have the usual
cursor-positioning effect.
This feature is to be considered experimental since I'm not sure of how much use it really is. A
mouse-following focus is the recommended mode of operation.
• Q: I've noticed that after a while, some sort of darker stains appear on my notes. Is that a bug in
some drawing routine?
A: No, this is not a bug. These "stains" are meant to resemble creases, caused by frequent handling of
a particular note (wear & tear, you see?). In fact, they're added with a certain probability whenever
you view a note by clicking on it (note that leafing through notes via [Shift]-[arrow keys] is not
affected), when you clear its textual or drawn contents via the edit mode panel (very outwearing, that
;-) ), and when a note is moved. This feature can be disabled at compile time by running configure
with `--disable-creases' as a parameter.
To prevent the question, no, worn-out notes cannot be ironed to get rid of the creases. Sorry. `:-p'
• Q: Is wmpinboard compatible with AfterStep's Wharf?
A: wmpinboard tries to autodetect whether Window Maker is running and sets itself up accordingly. If
this doesn't work for you for some reason, you can explicitly make it run in either Withdrawn- or
NormalState using the `-w' or `-n' flag, respectively. See the section on "OPTIONS".
Swallowing evidently works with AfterStep 1.6.10; I don't know about earlier versions. A Wharf config
line you might try is this:
*Wharf wmpinboard nil MaxSwallow "wmpinboard" wmpinboard &
Besides, wmpinboard has been reported to work with Blackbox.
• Q: I have X running at a color depth of 8 bits, i.e., in palette mode, and wmpinboard obviously
requires too many colors and thus looks real messy (or doesn't run at all, complaining about "not
enough free color cells"). What can I do about this?
A: As of version 0.99.1, the recommended solution is to upgrade whatever component of your system
restricts you to a palette mode.
• Q: Can I run multiple instances of wmpinboard as the same user, simultaneously?
A: No, this is certainly not a good idea. The run-time behavior may be unpredictable, and your data
file can get corrupted. Therefore, any wmpinboard process that's to be run interactively first checks
whether another interactive instance is running, and if so, refuses to run.
• Q: I've just upgraded from a pre-0.7 version of wmpinboard and noticed that its data file format has
changed completely since. Is there a way to upgrade and yet keep my existing notes?
A: There's a Perl script doing the conversion included with the distribution (the source one, anyway).
If your package didn't include that, feel free to mail to the author (see the section on "AUTHOR" at
the end of this documentation).
• Q: I find a mere 59 characters per note to be a real limitation. How about making wmpinboard pop up an
external window with more room for that? Or how about assigning that job to an external editor?
A: There's a variety of comprehensive programs for keeping notes out there, offering this functionality
but being rather heavy-weight since they are linked against one GUI library or another (CoolNotes or
KNotes come to mind). On the other hand, I couldn't find a WM-conforming reminder I could
omnipresently stick to my desktop anywhere, so I wrote wmpinboard. I wanted it to be small, neat, easy
to use, and yet useful in a way.
I hope that's about what the program is currently like. And I'd prefer to keep it like that rather
than inflate it by linking against a GUI library--eventually, the note editing code would outweigh the
rest of the application by a factor, and people would probably still create notes mostly shorter than
60 characters. If you restrict your memos to keywords and abbreviations, that's quite a lot.
I want wmpinboard to remain an applet in that it doesn't open up external windows and use (if just
temporarily) additional desktop space. I explicitly wrote it to have something omnipresent at a fixed
position on my desktop. I find it preferable to have the notes pop up in place rather than somewhere
else on the screen.
Personally, I use other programs for larger notes too; wmpinboard has been designed for things smaller
in size and greater in urgency, it's in no way meant to be a comprehensive knowledge base application
of any kind.
Summing up, I think a dock applet should be small both regarding its on-screen representation and the
resources it uses. That's why I don't intend to add any pop-up dialogs or similar things to
wmpinboard.
• Q: I've tried the program, yet I can't help finding it utterly useless. What shall I do?
A: The solution is simple. Just don't use it.
• Q: Will your answer to this question be "no"?
A: Nope.
HINTS
• A good way of making the best of the organizational features offered by wmpinboard is to use certain
colors and locations on the pinboard to indicate urgency and contents of a note. For example, you
might use each of the color groups for a certain kind of reminder, because that enables you to leaf
through all notes with related contents via [Shift]-[arrow keys] in edit mode. Besides, you might
assign each corner of the board a specific urgency, altogether allowing you to derive a note's type
from its color and its urgency from its location on the board. Thanks again to the ability to leaf
through all notes belonging to the same group of colors, notes with similar contents will still be
clustered in a way.
UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES
This piece of documentation doesn't cover any undocumented features.
FILES
~/.wmpinboarddata the user's wmpinboard data file ~/.wmpinboarddata.new temporary file created momentarily when saving data
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
$HOME
the user's home directory
RESTRICTIONS
• wmpinboard relies on a dock app tile size of at least 64x64 pixels. In fact, using smaller tiles
renders the applet rather useless, as, e.g., opening the edit mode panel becomes impossible.
• Unpredictable effects may be the results if a command line action is taken while an alarm is running
and others are due simultaneously. If just a single alarm is active and no others are due, that alarm
will be cancelled when the two instances of wmpinboard synchronize. If more instances are due during
the process, a race conditions arises that can't be solved satisfactorily due to the program's internal
structure and organization. Still, in theory, nothing critical will happen, and the most you'll lose
will be an alarm or two.
• wmpinboard data files are not designed to be portable across architectures. Due to differences in data
type representations that are likely otherwise, a datafile can only be reliably used by program
binaries running on machines of the same architecture.
• Certainly of no interest to anyone, but mentioned for the sake of completeness: wmpinboard's alarm
features will start to fail past 04:14:07 on Jan 19, 2037, which is due to the legacy Un*x time format.
BUGS
If you stumble on any bugs, feel free to mail the author. The same goes if you encounter any problems
running/using the program. Be sure to include any information you consider relevant, i.e., at a minimum,
the version of wmpinboard you're using as well as your OS and X versions.
Also, further suggestions are always welcome. Please check the TODO file that's part of the distribution
to see if what you're about to suggest isn't already on my "to do" list, or has been suggested earlier
and was rejected for one reason or other.
SEE ALSO
wmaker(1)
AUTHOR
wmpinboard is copyrighted (c) 1998-2000 by Marco Goetze, <gomar@mindless.com>. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, revision 2 or any later revision thereof. Use at your own risk. New releases of and themes for wmpinboard can be found at <http://www.tu- ilmenau.de/~gomar/stuff/wmpinboard/>, or that was true at least by the time this document was last updated.