RedNotebook

RedNotebook is a graphical diary and journal helping you keep track of notes and thoughts. It includes a calendar navigation, customizable templates, export functionality and word clouds. You can also format, tag and search your entries.

Download RedNotebook 0.8.9

New in Version 0.8.9: You can now save your journals on a remote server. SSH, FTP and WebDAV servers are supported. More info in the accompanying Help document. Polish and Dutch translations have been added.

Since Version 0.8.8 RedNotebook is available in the many languages. Those are German, Czech, Hebrew, Malay, Romainian, Russian, Simplified Chinese and French. RedNotebook is now fully translatable and waiting for you to make it speak your language.

Version 0.8.7: Content and config are now only saved when necessary. Help and interface have been updated.

Version 0.8.6 adds the long-awaited tray icon and fixes some bugs. Check it out

Recently 0.8.5 added e.g. Spell Checking, a $date$ macro for templates, some auto-completion and command line functionality. Oh yeah Grab it while it’s hot!

Find out about the newest features in the Release Notes or the more detailed Changelog.

You should always create a backup of your journals before upgrading. If you have any problems, feature wishes or suggestions, visit RedNotebook’s FORUM.

NEW: Follow RedNotebook on twitter or subscribe to the “New Releases Feed”.

Screenshots

Older Screenshots

Features

• Enter text for individual days and navigate using a fancy calendar
• Add Categories to days and fill them with content
• Tag your entries
• Format your text bold, italic or underlined
• Insert Images, files and links to websites
• Links and mail addresses are recognized automatically
• (Live-) Search
• Automatic saving
• Backup to zip archive
• Word Clouds with most often used words and tags
• Templates for each weekday and arbitrarily named ones
• Export the journal to HTML, Latex or plain text
• Graphical preferences dialog
• You can have multiple journals
• RedNotebook is open source software, you are free to use and redistribute it under the terms of the GPL
• The data is stored in plain text files, no database is needed
• … many more to come, i promise e.g.
  • Internationalization
  • … Your feature wish?

For more details on features and changes, view the CHANGELOG and the TODOLIST.

What do others write about RedNotebook?

Detailed Review about RedNotebook 0.8.8 at simple-linux.com: Italiano, Francais, (translated English version)

http://amot.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/rednotebook/ (English)

http://ficklegadget.blogspot.com/2009/07/little-off-beaten-path.html (English)

http://ubuntublog.ch/applikationen/das-rote-notizbuch-unter-gnulinux (Deutsch)

http://www.tuxtux.org/2009/10/05/ansichtssache-9-rednotebook-0-8-7/ (very nice German screencast about RedNotebook 0.8.7)

http://www.genbeta.com/freetos/vuelve-el-verano-vuelven-los-freetos (Español)

http://zonalinux.com.ar/rednotebook-un-buen-gestor-de-notas/ (Español)

http://cyaneus.net/node/230 (Portuguesa)

http://ubuntued.info/2009/09/rednotebook-um-diario-digital-para-o-ubuntu.html (Portuguesa)

http://databiblioteket.com/ovrigt/133 (Svenska)

http://insdom.narod.ru/hotsoft-2009/may-118/rednotebook-118.html (Russian)

Posts in the RedNotebook Forum (English)

Donate to help the project

I am a student and develop RedNotebook in my spare time. If you like the program and want to support its development or if you use RedNotebook for your job, I would appreciate a donation. Any amount is welcome! (Note: a PayPal account is not required and your name will be listed here only if you want to)

List of donors:

Fernando Díaz de la Serna: 15 € + 15 €

Rudolf Kahl: 25 €

Frequently Asked Questions

Why the name RedNotebook?

I am a big fan of Paul Auster’s books and in some of them (e.g. The New York Trilogy) the main characters possess red notebooks. Enough said, read the books !

How is the name of the software written?

RedNotebook. One word with a capital ‘R’ and ‘N’.

is there a shorter URL that links to this page?

Yes, you can use http://rednotebook.sourceforge.net

What’s up with those categories on the right? How do I use them?

The name “Categories” is a little bit confusing. It does not mean that a day is put into a category, but that there is additional content on the right, sorted into categories. “Topics” would probably be a better name.

Those topics have several items distributed over various days. I’ll give you an example: I like to maintain a list of cool things I have done. So if I did a cool thing on some day, I navigate to that day, add the category “Cool Stuff” and add an entry “Visit the pope” (Sadly I haven’t done that, yet ). When I have done more cool things on many days, they all have a category “Cool Stuff” and many different entries. Now it is possible to export only that category and get a list of the cool stuff that happened to me with the respective dates.

I want to put days into categories. How can I tag my entries?

You can tag your day entries by using the category feature (Tagging a day is pretty much the same as putting it into a category). Imagine you want to tag a day with the tag “work”. To do so, just navigate to the day and click on “Add Tag”. Then add the entry “work” and you’re done. You can now e.g. save your journal, open the cloud view and bring up the tag cloud. Clicking on the tag “work” will only show those days that are tagged with “work”.

Can I encrypt my diary?

You can use TrueCrypt to encrypt your journal. Nick Bair has written a nice tutorial about encrypting RedNotebook files on Windows. The procedure for other operating systems should be similar. The general idea is to create and mount an encrypted folder with TrueCrypt and put your journal files in there.

In recent Linux distributions is has become pretty easy to encrypt your entire home partition. I would recommend that to anyone who wishes to protect her/his diary and all other personal files. This method is especially useful for laptop users, because their computers are less likely to be stolen. If you encrypt your home partition all RedNotebook data will be encrypted, too.

Can I add multiple separate entries to one day?

No, that’s not possible. However there are at least two ways to achieve a similar functionality:

• Use two different journals (one named “Work”, the other “Play”)
• Separate your two entries by different titles (===Work===, ===Play===) and/or a horizontal line (20 “=”s).

How can I sync my journal with a server? How can I use one journal on many computers?

RedNotebook doesn’t provide that feature itself, because there are some programs that can handle synchronisation for it. You might want to try Conduit or Unison for example. To sync or backup your journal you have to sync your journal folder (default is “$HOME/.rednotebook/data/”) with a folder on your server. It would be great if someone could write a tutorial about that.

Will there be rich text (WYSIWYG) editing?

I am planning to add that feature in the future although I’m not sure when it’s gonna be. A lot of work has to be done to accomplish it and I want to do it properly. In the meantime you can just hit “Ctrl+P” for quickly getting a preview of your text.

Development

sourceforge.net project page, freshmeat project page

RedNotebook is developed by Jendrik Seipp.

If you find a bug please file a bugreport at Launchpad. If you don’t know how to use that site, a simple mail is equally fine. In both cases, please post the two files “configuration.cfg” and “rednotebook.log” from your “$HOME/.rednotebook/” directory.

Any questions or feature wishes ? Feel free to post your comment in the forum or contact me.

SVN

To check out RedNotebook make sure you have the subversion program installed on your system. Then run the following command:

“svn co https://rednotebook.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rednotebook/trunk rednotebook”

You can also browse the repository online.

Updates

Subscribe to the New releases RSS feed and be the first to know about a new version. You can also monitor the project at freshmeat.net.

Participate

If you’d like to improve RedNotebook there are many ways to do so:

• If you are no developer, you can:
  • Monitor the releases, test them and report bugs
  • Suggest new features or improvements
  • Translate RedNotebook
  • Spread the word about RedNotebook
• In addition, if you are a developer, you can also:
  • Contact me, if you’d like to write features yourself
  • Make a RedNotebook package for your distribution

Help is always appreciated, so just contact me if you want to support RedNotebook. We’ll find something for you to work on