Rhinote is a small, simple Python/Tkinter script that provides virtual "sticky-notes" on your desktop. It's handy for jotting down quick notes or holding copied text that you plan to paste elsewhere later. Notes can be saved (as plain ASCII text) for later viewing/editing with Rhinote or any other text editor. While many such "sticky-note" programs exist for virtually all computing platforms, Rhinote is extremely simple, lightweight, and "keyboard-friendly."
This update of Rhinote has been updated to run on Python 3, and has several new features available. See NEWS for the latest information.
On Linux, use a terminal to cd to the directory where rhinote.py lives and type
python3 rhinote.py
(or python3 rhinote.py &
to get your command prompt
back). Optionally, you may turn rhinote.py into an executable by placing it
in your ~/bin
directory, renaming it rhinote
, and making it executable with
(for example) chmod +x rhinote
.
On Windows, double-clicking on the rhinote-win.pyw
script should run it,
provided you have Python installed.
When the Rhinote note appears, simply start typing, or paste (Ctrl-V) any text you've already cut/copied to your system clipboard. Rhinote will automatically wrap words at the ends of lines.
Rhinote offers a set of very simple text and file manipulation tools; all commands are keyboard-driven. Pressing Ctrl-h at any time will display all available commands:
- Ctrl-x: Cut selected text
- Ctrl-c: Copy selected text
- Ctrl-v: Paste text from clipboard
- Ctrl-a: Select all text
- Ctrl-Shift-a: Unselect any selected text
- Ctrl-z: Undo
- Ctrl-Shift-z: Redo
- Ctrl-n: Open new (blank) Rhinote
- Ctrl-o: Open file (via a file dialog)
- Ctrl-s: Save current note
- Ctrl-Shift-s: Save current note as filename
- Ctrl-p: Print current note
- Ctrl-h: Display help
- Ctrl-@: Display about message
- Ctrl-B: Browse to this repository
- Ctrl-W: Close the current note
- Ctrl-Q: Quit the program, closing all notes
Currently, there is no mechanism to change the configuration of Rhinote. If you want to make changes, the only way is by modifying the source code. Most of the changable items are set up as constants at the top of the program, and can easily be changed.
The default colors for the notes cycle through various pastel color, chosen
to mimic paper sticky-notes. With the COLOR
constant. you can replace the
list with your own set of colors, or just a single color if you prefer.
(Make sure to keep the square brackets if you use a single color, or the
program will break.)
If you prefer the note windows to be a different size, you can change the
GEOMETRY
constant. The format is {width}x{height}, and is in pixels.
If you don't have Source Sans Pro
installed, or prefer to use a different font, you can change it using the FONT
constant. The font name is inside the curly braces, and the font size is after
that.
If you prefer to have no word wrapping, or want character-based wrapping
instead of word-based, you can change the WRAP
constant. Use tk.CHAR
for
character-based wrapping, and tk.NONE
to disable wrapping completely. Note
that no scroll bar will appear in the note window, so disabling wrapping is
not advisable.
Add this to your desktop menu:
cp rhinote.py $HOME/.local/bin/rhinote
cp rhinote.desktop $HOME/.local/share/applications/
cp icons/rhinote_48x48.png $HOME/.local/share/icons/rhinote.png
Rhinote offers a very rudimentary printing "system" (if you want to call it
that). It uses the enscript
program to format the text, then passes the
result to lp
(or lpr
if lp
is not found) for printing. If you don't have
enscript
installed, Rhinote will print using lp
/lpr
directly (so no
fancy formatting). As long as you have these two programs installed (most
Linux distributions do), Rhinote notes will print on your default printer.
A wrapper script, rhinote-win.pyw
, is provided to run under Windows. This
script, with the pyw
extension, allows Rhinote to run without a console
window appearing. If you want to make changes to the code, you can run
rhinote.py
directly, and see any messages in a console window.
Print functionality requires the use of pywin32
. Please install the latest
version using pip
. If you attempt to print without install pywin32
, you
will get an error message reminding you to install it.
pip install pywin32
The actual print process uses Windows Notepad to print a temporary text file, which is stored in your user folder.
The original website is inaccessible, but can be found via the Wayback Machine.
The original README file can be found here.
The original documentation file can be found here.