NAME

SYNOPSIS

  wmpinboard [options]

What wmpinboard is

wmpinboard is a Window Maker dock applet resembling a miniature pinboard. It's intended to somewhat relieve heavily littered desktops by allowing you to place reminders on a graphical on-screen pinboard rather than producing a mess of real notes all around your keyboard (thus being environmentally A Good Thing, too ;-) ). It supports arbitrary 6x10 X fonts and has XLocale support, enabling you to enter locale-dependent special characters if set up appropriately. Besides text, you can add small monochrome sketches to your notes or simply encircle or underline words as a means of emphasis, and alarms can be set to explicitly remind you of things. Above all, wmpinboard is animated in redundant ways to make it look even more attractive, and themeability provides for a way of adapting its appearance to that of the rest of your desktop.

What wmpinboard ISN'T

Clearly, wmpinboard doesn't allow you to keep an unlimited number of notes holding arbitrary amounts of information, and that's not what it's meant to do. Just as real notes offer limited space, so do those simulated by wmpinboard. Besides, as a dock applet, it aims at being small and neat and yet useful in a way, and that's what it is, too, or considered to be by some people, anyway. If you need room for more comprehensive reminders, use another program, either additionally or exclusively. There's a variety of such out there, but their niche is different from that which wmpinboard claims.

OPTIONS

Configuration directives

This type of command-line options changes some aspect of wmpinboard's configuration that is saved along with the data and thus set in a more permanent way. Only one such parameter may be specified per call, and there mustn't be another instance running.

`--font=FONT'

Makes wmpinboard use the specified font; `FONT' can be one of the shortcuts listed when running the program with "`--help'" as a parameter, or a complete X descriptor of a fixed size 6x10 font. The pinboard must be empty in order for this option to be applicable. For more details, see the section on "FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS".

`--theme=FILE'

Configures wmpinboard to load the specified theme when started interactively the next time. `FILE' is the location of a wmpinboard theme file (typically with a file name extension of .wmpbtheme). If it can't be loaded when run interactively, the program will revert to its default theme. If `FILE' is an empty string or "default", the use of a custom theme will be deactivated.

Themes affect wmpinboard's appearance, in particular, its pinboard, edit mode and alarm panel pixmaps, the latter's digits, and possibly the location of the pinboard mode label area (via which notes are created). For downloading themes, or if you're inclined to create one yourself and need instructions, check out the program's home page (see the section on "AUTHOR" or wmpinboard's "`--help'" output for the URL). The themes kit containing instructions and samples on how to create theme files for wmpinboard that can be downloaded there is also included with the source package of the program.

`--alarm-cmd=CMD'

Configures `CMD' as the command to be executed on alarms. E.g., you could use "`xkbbell'" to cause the program to beep on such occassions, or make it run some sound-playing program. To reset the alarm command to none, make `CMD' a zero-length string.

Run-time options

`-d DISPLAY' or `--display=DISPLAY'

Uses the specified X display rather than the default one.

`-c' or `--click-to-focus'

This turns on some emulation of a click-based keyboard focus mode. See the section on "FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS".

`-t TIME' or `--timeout=TIME'

Sets the edit mode timeout (i.e., the number of seconds of idleness after which edit mode is terminated automatically) to `TIME' seconds. The compile-time default is 60s, but this may have been changed for your particular build; run with `-v' if in doubt to check that. Specifying a value of 0 (zero) will disable the timeout.

`-n' or `--normal-state'

Forces wmpinboard to run in so-called NormalState, which is preferred by AfterStep's Wharf.

`-w' or `--withdrawn-state'

Forces the program to run in so-called WithdrawnState, as desired by the Window Maker dock. This option and the previous one are mutually exclusive. Note also that wmpinboard tries to auto-detect whether Window Maker is running and sets itself up accordingly. Using `-n' or `-w' should only be necessary in case those heuristics fail on your system for some reason or other.

`--light'

Use this switch to suppress animations.

Command-line actions

Even though wmpinboard is by design an interactive application, there may be occasions when it comes in handy to be able to access/manipulate notes from the command line. That's why the program offers a set of command-line options allowing for basic operations of that kind. Still, it should be kept in mind that wmpinboard is primarily meant to be used interactively.

All of the options below will, if an interactive instance of wmpinboard is running in the background, cause that to save its data (and quit edit mode, if necessary), and if any changes are made by the respective option, the interactive instance will then be signalled to re-read the data file. Even though the implemented methods of inter-process communication should generally be sufficiently safe with respect to avoiding data file corruption, it's in theory possible to undermine the concept and cause damage that way--yet this won't happen unless you deliberately take pains to achieve the goal. Generally, everything should work fine as long as you don't try running multiple non-interactive instances of wmpinboard simultaneously.

Only one of the below actions can be specified per call to wmpinboard.

`--dump'

This dumps the contents of all notes, replacing line breaks by spaces (unless preceded by a hyphen) and shortening sequences of blanks. The list of dumped strings will be sorted by color groups. If you use special characters in your notes, make sure your terminal's running with the same character set as wmpinboard, or what you'll see might have a garbage-like quality.

Each line of output represents one note and is prefixed by the internal number currently identifying the respective note and, if an alarm is configured for the respective note, time and date (or "daily").

`--dump-raw'

Unlike the "cooked" dump described above, this just dumps the raw contents of all notes without applying any kind of formatting. May come in handy if your notes happen to contain E-mail addresses or other things for which lines 10 characters wide are too narrow.

`--del=NUMBER'

This option will remove the note identified by `NUMBER' from the pinboard. `NUMBER' is a number determined by the output of either dump option, which should be consulted right before using this one, since note numbers may change when notes are moved around on the board or others are removed.

`--add=STRING'

When run with this option, wmpinboard will add a new note (provided the maximal number of notes has not yet been reached) at a random position on the board, with contents `STRING', word-wrapping the text at the end of the note's lines where necessary (after white space and hyphens). If due to this wrapping, the entire string cannot be stored on the note, the remainder will be discarded silently.

In order to create a note with a certain color, the string can be prefixed by a color code specifying the group of colors which a random color is to be selected from (code letters are recognized case-insensitively):

  %G - green
  %Y - yellow/white
  %R - reddish
  %B - blue
    

Alternatively or additionally, you may specify a position code as "%1" through "%9", defining an approximate position on the board where the note is to be placed. Each of the nine figures corresponds to a ninth of the board with its index assigned in accordance with the layout of your keypad (i.e., "%1" meaning lower left, "%9" upper right corner, and so forth).

Thus,

  wmpinboard --add '%g%5test'
    

will place a green note saying "test" at the center of the board.

(Note: The "%" character can be escaped by a second one if you want to add an un-prefixed string starting with a percent character.)

`--add-raw=STRING'

Via this option, a new note can be added from the command line (provided that this won't exceed the maximum number of notes). `STRING' specifies the raw contents of the note, as printed by `--dump-raw'. The same set of color group and position codes as for the previous option applies.

General options

`-h' or `--help'

This prints a help screen listing command line options together with brief descriptions.

`-i' or `--info'

Prints information about the current user configuration (font, theme, alarm command) and some useless statistics.

`-v' or `--version'

This prints some more detailed version information, in particular, which compile-time settings this binary was built with.

DESCRIPTION

Pinboard view

This is wmpinboard's normal mode of operation. A potentially chaotic arrangement of tiny squares on a beige-colored oblong (default theme) is meant to resemble notes pinned to a cork board. Possible actions include:

• Add a note, by left-clicking on the board's "TO DO" label. This creates a new, blank, randomly-colored note at a random position on the board and puts wmpinboard in edit mode (see below). If you prefer to place a new note at a certain position before being prompted to enter its contents, this can be done by moving the mouse cursor after having clicked on the label. This will realize the note and allow you to drag it to a position of your choice. wmpinboard will switch to edit mode as soon as you release the mouse button.
  
• Edit/view a note, by left-clicking on a note. This switches to edit mode (described below).
  
• Move a note, by dragging it using the right mouse button. This also raises the note in question on top of all others. Depending on its horizontal position, the note will be tilted automatically. As a side-effect, a single brief right-click can be used to raise a note on top of overlapping ones without moving it.

  By dragging a note with the left mouse button, you can move it without changing its level with respect to other notes, i.e., without raising it on top of all others.
  

Edit mode

This mode serves two purposes: on the one hand, it presents you with a "full-size" view of a note's contents, on the other, you can use the occasion to edit it. Due to its limited size, a note can hold up to 10 characters on 6 lines (minus one on the last, i.e., 59 characters altogether), plus a monochrome sketch of some kind. Possibly actions:

•

Enter text. wmpinboard supports user-selectable fonts and dead keys, so you should be able to enter any characters that are usually accessible via your keyboard and have them displayed correctly. Furthermore, the cursor can be moved around using the arrow keys (or EMACS-style via [Ctrl]-[N]/[P]/[F]/[B], if you are so inclined). Alternatively, it can be placed explicitly by left-clicking where you want it to be. Other special keys that are supported include:

•

Cut'n'paste text. Despite the limitations implied, wmpinboard has support for cutting & pasting to and from the X clipboard:

• Leave edit mode. This is achieved by left-clicking on the triangle in the lower right-hand side corner. If the note is completely empty, it will be removed from the board. In any case, this returns to the pinboard view.
  
• Pop up a panel with some further options to choose from. This is done by right-clicking on the aforementioned triangle. To learn what the panel is there for, see the corresponding section below.
  
• Draw a sketch. This mode can be activated via the panel, and deactivated by either right-clicking somewhere on the note or opening the panel again. While in drawing mode, the mouse pointer is pencil-shaped, and drawing can be done by keeping the left mouse button pressed and dragging the mouse, just as you'd expect. Sketch and text may overlap each other, but keyboard input is ignored while in drawing mode.
  
• Erase a sketch. Just like DRAWing mode, this mode is entered via the panel, and can be quit just like the former. In erase mode, the text is hidden, so you needn't guess whether a pixel belongs to an entered character or a drawn sketch. Note that the erase cursor's point is slightly larger than the one used when drawing.

Note: wmpinboard remembers where you left the text cursor after you last edited a note and restores this position when you edit it the next time.

Edit mode panel

This panel is intended to provide easy access to some options affecting edit mode or the current note in general. The panel looks like this (letters denoting the buttons for reference below):

    +---+---+---+---+
    ⎪ a ⎪ c ⎪ e ⎪ g ⎪
    +---+---+---+---+
    ⎪ b ⎪ d ⎪ f ⎪ h ⎪
    +---+---+---+---+

Here's a description of what each button does:

(a)

Left-clicking on this button opens and closes the alarm panel (see below), which allows you to configure alarm settings for the note being edited. When the alarm panel is visible, the alarm is activated. To turn it off, press the button again and make the panel disappear.

(b)

This button allows one to cycle through all colors available for notes (20 of them). Clicking on it won't close the panel, so this can be done repeatedly. Using the left mouse button traverses the colors in ascending, using the right button in descending order. Note: colors can also be changed via a keyboard shortcut in edit mode (see that section).

(c)

This button closes the panel and returns to edit mode, with the sketch-drawing feature enabled (see above).

(d)

Closes the panel and returns to edit mode, with the sketch-erasing feature enabled (see above). Don't panic if entered text vanishes all of a sudden when you do this: this is because wmpinboard intentionally hides it to eradicate the need for you to make wild guesses as to what's entered text and which pixels belong to a sketch.

(e)

This button removes all entered text on the current note and places the text cursor on the very first character. Besides, it closes the panel, thus returning to edit mode.

(f)

Pressing this button completely removes a drawn sketch on the current note and returns to edit mode.

(g)

This option removes the *entire* note from the board and returns to pinboard view.

(h)

This button merely closes the panel (and thus puts you back in edit mode). The same can be achieved by simply right-clicking in this view.

Alarm panel

This panel can be accessed from the edit mode panel described above. If the panel is visible while the edit mode panel is on, the alarm is set, otherwise, it's disabled.

The alarm panel consists of six distinct clickable areas. The digits to the left and right of the colon are the hour and minute which an alarm is to be set for. Below them, a date can be specified in month, day order. On the right, there are two toggle buttons (which can be either green (on) or red (off) and are mutually exclusive). The top one represents a daily alarm whereas the bottom one indicates/sets a date-specific one.

The hour, minute, month, and day of month fields can each be incremented or decremented by left- or right-clicking on them, respectively. Clicking on one of the toggle buttons configures the alarm as the respective type.

As the above description implies, there are two distinct kinds of alarms: daily and date-specific ones.

Alarms are generally executed only when in pinboard view and not moving any notes about. If you're keeping the program busy at the time an alarm would have to occur, it will be delayed until you're finished (i.e., let the program return to idle pinboard view). The same holds if an alarm occurs while another one is running.

If all prerequisites are given and an alarm becomes due, the corresponding note is displayed in edit view, and the display starts to flash on and off, along with the alarm command being executed (see the section on "OPTIONS"). To stop the blinking, click on the note. From then on, the note will be in edit mode.

For daily alarms, the entered date is ignored, and as the name suggests, they're run every day at the specified time. To deactivate such an alarm, you have to open the edit mode panel and click button (a) to make the alarm panel disappear, which turns the alarm off.

In contrast, date-specific alarms are executed only once, at the specified day and time. Since a year cannot be specified (explicitly), the alarm will be run on this date's next occurrence within a year from when the alarm was set. After that, the alarm will automatically be disabled. If a date-specific alarm becomes due while wmpinboard isn't running, it will be displayed as soon as the program is started the next time--which does not go for daily alarms.

The default mode for alarms is date-specific, and time and date are initialized with the next full hour when the alarm panel is opened the first time for a given note.

Internally, alarm times are stored in universal format, i.e., if you change the time zone after having set an alarm, the time will stay universally the same but will differ relative to the new time zone from what absolute time you originally set. This behavior is intended.

Finally, it should be mentioned that there are a few limitations with respect to command line actions (such as `--add', `--del', `-i', etc.). See the section on "RESTRICTIONS".

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

• Q: Is a "pinboard" this small really of any use?

  A: Of course the limited size imposes certain restrictions, but if you think about it, you'll agree that a real life pinboard reminds you of things by the mere existence of notes being pinned to it. In order to read what they say, you have to step close and, possibly, detach the note.

  Quite similarly, wmpinboard reminds you of things by facing you with colored representations of notes on your screen. To find out what it was you intended them to remind you of, all you have to do is click on a note, which will then be displayed full size. Furthermore, the alarm feature introduced in a later version allows for even more explicit reminders and thus renders wmpinboard even more powerful in a way than any real-life cork board. `:-)'

  By choosing from a variety of possible colors, you can assign particular colors to certain kinds of reminders, which may further enhance wmpinboard's usability. Moreover, you can place certain notes on certain areas of the board to emphasize their category, urgency, etc. It's up to you what to make of it.

  Finally, by adding drawing capabilities, I've definitely overcome the contents quantity barrier imposed by the maximum number of 59 characters, for as everyone knows, a picture is worth more than a thousand words. *grin*
  

• Q: I don't live in an English-speaking country, so what about extended characters (umlauts, accents, cyrillic alphabet)?

  A: wmpinboard allows you to use an arbitrary 8bit X font, provided that its characters are of a fixed size of 6x10 (or, deprecated but possible, anything <= 7x10) pixels. The default font is "6x10" (more precisely, it's called "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-*-ISO8859-1"), an ISO8859-1 (Latin1) font which should be part of every XFree installation.

  In order to make wmpinboard use another font, run it as

    $ wmpinboard --font=FONT
      

  where FONT is either a shortcut for a compiled-in font name (see the section on "OPTIONS" for a list of those) or a valid, complete X font descriptor. This is a configuration directive, meaning that no other instance of wmpinboard may be running at the time. Note that this only works if there are no more notes on the board. It's intentionally been made impossible to change the font while there are notes saved in wmpinboard's data file, since this might result in garbage being displayed. Of course even a font specified via a shortcut has to exist on your system in order to be usable.

  If a configured custom font cannot be loaded or has invalid dimensions, wmpinboard will try to revert. Note that this won't affect the font name saved along with the data, though.
  

• Q: How can I disable those vexing, superfluous animations?

  A:

    $ wmpinboard --light
      

  
  
• Q: Why aren't those animations smooth all of the time? Sometimes it looks like they're being skipped entirely.

  A: This presumably is a multitasking issue: depending on the current system load and wmpinboard's/the X server's recent CPU usage history, it may take a moment until the scheduling has been adapted to the suddenly increased CPU load implied by displaying the animation, and short as it is, it may already be finished until this has happened, i.e., it's the X server lagging behind in updating the program's display if wmpinboard's been idle for some time prior to that. It may sound paradoxical, but the effect is the more likely to show the lower the system's load is. I don't see a way to avoid this effect--either this, or you turn off animations altogether.
  

• Q: When I leave wmpinboard idle in edit mode for some time, edit mode is terminated automatically. Is that intended?

  A: Yes. After 60 idle seconds (that's the default; see the section on "OPTIONS") in edit mode (no mouse click and no keyboard input), edit mode is terminated automatically. If the note being edited happens to be blank, it will be discarded (or removed if an existing note is being edited).

  This timeout can, however, be adjusted according to your preferences or turned off using the `-t' parameter. See the section on "OPTIONS" for this.
  

• Q: When does wmpinboard save its data?

  A: Notes data is saved on each of these occasions:

• Q: I've tried my best and littered the entire pinboard with quite a lot of notes. Now I can't seem to be able to add another one.

  A: There's a compile-time limit of 20 notes. I think more notes on this tiny a board really don't make any sense.
  

• Q: I've explicitly configured my window manager for click-based rather than mouse-following focus, but wmpinboard's focus follows the mouse regardless. Can I change this?

  A: By default, wmpinboard actively claims the keyboard input focus (if it's in note edit mode) whenever the pointer is moved over the application's area. Since wmpinboard is a dock applet, i.e., a withdrawn rather than a "real" X window, it can't be assigned a focus in the same way as to the latter ones. However, running wmpinboard with the parameter `-c' will make it emulate some sort of click-based focusing. This means, it actively claims the keyboard focus only on these occasions:

• Q: I've noticed that after a while, some sort of darker stains appear on my notes. Is that a bug in some drawing routine?

  A: No, this is not a bug. These "stains" are meant to resemble creases, caused by frequent handling of a particular note (wear & tear, you see?). In fact, they're added with a certain probability whenever you view a note by clicking on it (note that leafing through notes via [Shift]-[arrow keys] is not affected), when you clear its textual or drawn contents via the edit mode panel (very outwearing, that ;-) ), and when a note is moved. This feature can be disabled at compile time by running configure with `--disable-creases' as a parameter.

  To prevent the question, no, worn-out notes cannot be ironed to get rid of the creases. Sorry. `:-p'
  

• Q: Is wmpinboard compatible with AfterStep's Wharf?

  A: wmpinboard tries to autodetect whether Window Maker is running and sets itself up accordingly. If this doesn't work for you for some reason, you can explicitly make it run in either Withdrawn- or NormalState using the `-w' or `-n' flag, respectively. See the section on "OPTIONS".

  Swallowing evidently works with AfterStep 1.6.10; I don't know about earlier versions. A Wharf config line you might try is this:

    *Wharf wmpinboard nil MaxSwallow "wmpinboard" wmpinboard &
      

  Besides, wmpinboard has been reported to work with Blackbox.
  
• Q: I have X running at a color depth of 8 bits, i.e., in palette mode, and wmpinboard obviously requires too many colors and thus looks real messy (or doesn't run at all, complaining about "not enough free color cells"). What can I do about this?

  A: As of version 0.99.1, the recommended solution is to upgrade whatever component of your system restricts you to a palette mode.
  

• Q: Can I run multiple instances of wmpinboard as the same user, simultaneously?

  A: No, this is certainly not a good idea. The run-time behavior may be unpredictable, and your data file can get corrupted. Therefore, any wmpinboard process that's to be run interactively first checks whether another interactive instance is running, and if so, refuses to run.
  

• Q: I've just upgraded from a pre-0.7 version of wmpinboard and noticed that its data file format has changed completely since. Is there a way to upgrade and yet keep my existing notes?

  A: There's a Perl script doing the conversion included with the distribution (the source one, anyway). If your package didn't include that, feel free to mail to the author (see the section on "AUTHOR" at the end of this documentation).
  

• Q: I find a mere 59 characters per note to be a real limitation. How about making wmpinboard pop up an external window with more room for that? Or how about assigning that job to an external editor?

  A: There's a variety of comprehensive programs for keeping notes out there, offering this functionality but being rather heavy-weight since they are linked against one GUI library or another (CoolNotes or KNotes come to mind). On the other hand, I couldn't find a WM-conforming reminder I could omnipresently stick to my desktop anywhere, so I wrote wmpinboard. I wanted it to be small, neat, easy to use, and yet useful in a way.

  I hope that's about what the program is currently like. And I'd prefer to keep it like that rather than inflate it by linking against a GUI library--eventually, the note editing code would outweigh the rest of the application by a factor, and people would probably still create notes mostly shorter than 60 characters. If you restrict your memos to keywords and abbreviations, that's quite a lot.

  I want wmpinboard to remain an applet in that it doesn't open up external windows and use (if just temporarily) additional desktop space. I explicitly wrote it to have something omnipresent at a fixed position on my desktop. I find it preferable to have the notes pop up in place rather than somewhere else on the screen.

  Personally, I use other programs for larger notes too; wmpinboard has been designed for things smaller in size and greater in urgency, it's in no way meant to be a comprehensive knowledge base application of any kind.

  Summing up, I think a dock applet should be small both regarding its on-screen representation and the resources it uses. That's why I don't intend to add any pop-up dialogs or similar things to wmpinboard.
  

• Q: I've tried the program, yet I can't help finding it utterly useless. What shall I do?

  A: The solution is simple. Just don't use it.
  

• Q: Will your answer to this question be "no"?

  A: Nope.

HINTS

•

A good way of making the best of the organizational features offered by wmpinboard is to use certain colors and locations on the pinboard to indicate urgency and contents of a note. For example, you might use each of the color groups for a certain kind of reminder, because that enables you to leaf through all notes with related contents via [Shift]-[arrow keys] in edit mode. Besides, you might assign each corner of the board a specific urgency, altogether allowing you to derive a note's type from its color and its urgency from its location on the board. Thanks again to the ability to leaf through all notes belonging to the same group of colors, notes with similar contents will still be clustered in a way.

UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES

FILES

~/.wmpinboarddata

the user's wmpinboard data file

~/.wmpinboarddata.new

temporary file created momentarily when saving data

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

$HOME

the user's home directory

RESTRICTIONS

• wmpinboard relies on a dock app tile size of at least 64x64 pixels. In fact, using smaller tiles renders the applet rather useless, as, e.g., opening the edit mode panel becomes impossible.
  
• Unpredictable effects may be the results if a command line action is taken while an alarm is running and others are due simultaneously. If just a single alarm is active and no others are due, that alarm will be cancelled when the two instances of wmpinboard synchronize. If more instances are due during the process, a race conditions arises that can't be solved satisfactorily due to the program's internal structure and organization. Still, in theory, nothing critical will happen, and the most you'll lose will be an alarm or two.
  
• wmpinboard data files are not designed to be portable across architectures. Due to differences in data type representations that are likely otherwise, a datafile can only be reliably used by program binaries running on machines of the same architecture.
  
• Certainly of no interest to anyone, but mentioned for the sake of completeness: wmpinboard's alarm features will start to fail past 04:14:07 on Jan 19, 2037, which is due to the legacy Un*x time format.

BUGS

Also, further suggestions are always welcome. Please check the TODO file that's part of the distribution to see if what you're about to suggest isn't already on my "to do" list, or has been suggested earlier and was rejected for one reason or other.

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR

New releases of and themes for wmpinboard can be found at <http://www.tu-ilmenau.de/~gomar/stuff/wmpinboard/>, or that was true at least by the time this document was last updated.