tags: chapter fork search text styles help nofork tab colors tab completion auto completion list tags printing keyboard shortcuts new copy styles full text search find tutorial

- Other features -

Let's quickly look at all the other features of Tobu. In file | list tags you can view all tags used with all the items stored in our database. It limits the range to first 2000 tags to keep things quick. File | apply filters will perform the same action as hitting the 'list' button as we did before, which can also be done by hitting Ctrl-L shortcut. File | new tab is the shortcut for using the 'new tab' button (you can also open a new tab by double-clicking in the empty area near tab names). File | find will search items (including text content area) for entered text and show matching items in the list window. There is also a separate find command available by hitting Ctrl-F inside the text area that will search inside the current item. Options will let you set the custom editor program used to edit text in content area when you click 'edit..' button. Built-in content area editor is very basic - you might want to use gvim or wordpad or some other editor of choice for longer entries and for more advanced printing options (basic printing is provided by File | Print). Note that on Linux, some editors fork when started by another program, making Tobu think that they finished editing and exited. Tobu will fix this automatically for gvim by appending '--nofork' to the command, if you have this problem with some other editor, find out the command line argument to stop forking and add it to the editor command in options screen. The symptom of this problem is that text in the text area is not updated after you edit it with external editor & save it.

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 - just like the shopping list we did earlier or a todo list.

Usually, the most labor-intensive part of using Tobu is entering tags. Tobu can help you type tags faster by using auto completion - hit '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 hit Space and then press Tab or enter a comma and then press Tab. If you hit Tab when the cursor is right next to one or more letters, it will not go to the text area even if no autocompletion matches are found, which may be confusing at times. You might want to use Enter key to go from Title area to Tags area and then to Text area instead of Tab key - it will always work consistently.

Help | About box will show you the total number of items currently stored in the database.

The 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 or by clicking the toolbar button.

You can make a selection and apply a text style by pressing one of the style buttons to the right of title text entry field. The styles cannot be combined due to limited number of styles supported by textarea widget I used. Since Tobu is not meant to be a word processor, this should hopefully be enough.

Use File | Write to file command to dump entire database to a text file or a set of linked html files.