Tobu revolves around tagging each item of information and using filters to create lists of items, to sort and filter them further as needed; the aim of Tobu is to avoid organizing data as it is added and instead to limit the job of adding items to describing them with tags and sortable tags (more on that below), it is only when user is looking for data it is organized on the fly by filtering tags and sorting resulting lists.

Tobu has many functions which work in the ways that are not obvious. Therefore it's highly recommended that you at least scan through this guide. In order to start using Tobu it's necessary to understand the basics of adding tags, filtering, using sortable tags, searching for a tag. The optional topics that can be left off for later are templates, views and favorite tags. Keyboard shortcuts are not an afterthought in Tobu - they are carefully assigned to make the most important functions easily available without having to use mouse, you can look at them at any time by going to Help | Keyboard Shortcuts.

Tobu uses standard sqlite data file to store the database. It's stored in "data.db" in program's directory; you can use any tools that work with standard sqlite files to use it, in one of the upcoming versions of Tobu I will provide a script that will create linked html files or a plain text file out of the database, as well as in-program option to do the same for the current filtered item list.

Please look at the Graphical Overview page shown on the right side above to get a quick walkthrough of basic Tobu features.

More special sorting rules will be added in future releases.

    per 1/4 cup:
        dietary fiber, 14g, 56% dv
        protein        13g
        calcium        2%
        iron           2%
        folate         50%
        magnesium      12%
        

If you will enter a few more items tagged with 'nutrition', the lentils item will show up in that listing, as well.

These fields will of course also be very useful for buy list items, if you wish to keep them around after you bought that item, for appointments and so forth (however, keep in mind that Tobu currently does not notify you about approaching appointments - this feature will be added in the future.)

You can also drag and drop files into text area or in attach area, they will end up in attach area either way.

New copy button will create a new record with contents of all fields copied from current record. This can be useful if you're entering a large number of records that are similar to each other, i.e. if they have mostly the same tags - like the buying list we did earlier or a todo list.

Usually, the most labor-intensive part of using Tobu is entering tags, aside from entering text area content. Tobu can not do anything to do the latter part easier, but it can help you type tags faster by using auto completion by pressing 'tab' after a few characters of a tag are typed in - Tobu will look at last 2000 tags used or searched for and will try to auto-complete the tag; if more than one match is found, they will be listed in the status bar. Since this feature uses the Tab key to auto complete tags, pressing tab will not take you to the text area as you might expect. In order to go to the text area, you can either hit Enter or press a space and then press Tab or enter a comma and then press Tab. In effect, if Tobu sees that you may be trying to autocomplete previous word, it will not switch to text area, even if no matches are found - it would be too confusing to try to do autocompletion, fail and end up in textarea even though you still need to add more tags or finish typing in the current one. In fact, you might want to use Enter key to go from Title area to Tags area and then to Text area - it will always work consistently.

Tobu About box will show you the total number of items currently stored in the database - you can see it by going to Help | About.

Normally, you can click on an item in the list to load it into the current tab - the only exception is the case when an item you click is already selected in the list pane; in this case you usually don't need to load it because it would already be loaded when you selected it in the first place, but in some cases you might need to load it again - for instance if you loaded it, closed the tab and now wish to load it in current tab. To load an item that was already selected in the listing, double click on it or select another item and then select current item again.

Note that tabs in Tobu have automatically-assigned colors - these colors don't have any special meaning except that they make it easier to find the tab you're looking for.

You can see the list of keyboard shortcuts by going to Help | Keyboard Shortcuts.

Note that in 0.4.11 Tobu was changed to show only columns with tags that match two or more items - the ones that match just one item will not be shown because they're relatively useless since they don't allow you to see a set of items by sorting the column - and add too much clutter when thirty or more items are listed.

You can also click in the filter box or use down keyboard key to pick from a list of recently searched tags and a list of favorite tags. Recent list will be on top and contain 5 recently used tags, right below it you will see the list of favorite tags that can be added and removed from Tags menu.

You have to hit Esc to use text you typed in as-is, since Enter will always load a match from drop-down box if there is at least one match. This can be confusing because exact match is not necessarily highlighted in the drop down menu.

Currently Tobu has one level of undo in a text area that will restore last change, beyond that all changes are lost. Eventually Tobu will support multiple levels of Undo.

There are a few special directives you can use in your templates. Here they are: '%a' will insert an abbreviated weekday name, %d - day of month, %b - abbreviated month name, %Y - current full year and finally %% will insert a single percent sign.

You will be able to see all diary entries for a certain month but you won't see a list of items related to a certain topic spanning many categories. As the number of items grows to 5k, 10k, 50k and more, it becomes exponentially harder to find a set of relevant items; it's also harder to enter items in the tree structure because you have to choose between many categories that may be relevant. Full-text search helps but it will almost always produce a set of results that is too big or too small, it is particularly difficult to use search if you're looking for a set of items instead of just one particular items, and naturally you won't be able to sort results as you may do with tobu.

Tobu makes it easier to enter new items because you are not trying to foresee how you might need to find the information later, or how it fits into the grand hierarchy - you're only describing the item as it is. The task of organizing information is relegated to the time you search for a set of items, as opposed to an outliner or a folder structure where you organize information as you add it and then use that old organization - which may be unsuitable - when you look for records. In short - you don't have to organize your information at all - you only have to describe it and the only time you have to see organized information is when you search for items or sets of items.

One way to look at tobu is to see it as a database that can be used quickly and easily by direct interaction. Another way to view it as an evolution of a tree-like outliner that lets you maintain multiple web-like connections between items as opposed to single descending parent | children connection.

The only tricky part of using Tobu is knowing which tags will describe the items in a way that will be most helpful when you search and sort them in the future. There are no definite rules here, and the only way to learn is to use Tobu for some time, but some rule of thumbs are as follows: you don't need to duplicate text that is already used in title and put it in tags area at all times, filter boxes will search and try to match titles as well as tags, but tags will create a column that will mark whether an item has this tag or not. For example, if you have an item called 'buy lentils', you might put 'buy, lentils' or 'buy, lentils, buy lentils' in tags - the difference is that second item will have a mark in the column titled 'buy lentils' while first will not. If you have a number of items that are marked with 'buy lentils' tag, you will be able to sort them apart from buy list, which is something you probably don't need in most cases - it should be enough to be able to filter for two tags, 'buy' and 'lentils' or to filter by 'buy' and sort by 'lentils' column.