I've been bragging recently about how many obstacles I've overcome with Linux as a whole. There's many things I've been doing to Ubuntu to make it extremely fast and flexible for my uses. I also happen to be one of those people that forgets absolutely everything.

I very frequently decide I'm going to do something later that isn't something big and forget about it, or forget about a homework assignment. I've tried using those note taking and memo apps. I found that tomboy was pretty good. Unfortunately, not good enough.

I decided to go through and figure out a very simple way to take memos or quick little notes that wouldn't eat up any extra memory or waste any extra battery.

The isn't a small app that you can download but it can be set up very easily. I don't know how to do key binding in anything other than OpenBox but I'm sure a few quick Google searches will answer things pretty quick. I'll try to do a search and list some of my finds. later on.

First off, you'll need to make the script. I keep all of my scripts inside of ~/.bin/ unless I want them system usable, in which case I use /usr/local/sbin/ for most things.

So, open up your favorite text editor and create ~/.bin/memo. Add the following text to this file.

#!/bin/bash
echo "Enter a short memo followed by Enter."
read memo
echo "$memo" >> ~/memo
exit

I know it's short but also very efficient. Now you need to make the script executable. Do this with chmod +x ~/.bin/memo.

Now we need to be able to call this script, otherwise it's not very useful to us. You can either call it from the terminal. If you have ~/.bin in your PATH variable you can just call it by typing memo. You can add it to your path variable with PATH="$PATH:~/.bin".

I prefer to call it using a hothey. I use Alt+F6. Not for any particular reason other that Alt+F2 and Alt+F4 are being used.

Open up ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml. Please, don't attempt this if you don't have a very minimal understanding of XML.

Find the tag. You will want to add a level directly below this. I actually put mine right above . Add the following text to the XML file.

/usr/bin/xterm -T Memo -geometry 63x2+450+336 -e /bin/bash -l -c /home/michael/.bin/memo

Save the file and reload OpenBox. You should now be able to Press Alt+F6 and have a box pop up in your screen that you can take a memo with. Type some text in and press enter. This text will be tagged to the end of ~/memo.

I personally have a --- UNSORTED --- line at the end of the file. Whenever I go into the file, I can take anything below that line and sort things out.

The -geometry option for xterm can be kind of tricky to figure out. You will probably need to mess with it to fit your screen.
-geometry AxB+C+D . A=Width | B=Height | C=From Left | D=From Top

Hope this can help you as much as it helped me.