Tomboy on Windows

News

• October 12, 2008: tomboy-portable2 branch was merged into trunk. Everything on this page is now obsolete. Tomboy 0.13.0 will be supported on Windows, with an installer, etc. Currently buildable in Visual Studio or SharpDevelop.

• September 2, 2008: New tomboy-portable2 branch will be merged into trunk after we branch for 0.12.0. It has a Visual Studio solution and runs fairly well on Windows! See Sandy's blog post for details.

• March 29, 2008: Cross-platform Tomboy is the focus for the next Tomboy release, 0.12.0 (possibly 1.0). Anyone interested in helping is welcome to join us! Please see Tomboy/DevMeetingZeroPointTwelve and Tomboy/RoadMap.

• August 15, 2007: Tomboy on Windows is definitely not happening for 0.8.0. I've been busy with note synchronization and nobody else has volunteered. We have not discussed plans for 0.10.0, but speaking for myself I doubt I'll have much time to work on it. We'd be very interested in contributions from the community. Feel free to bug us on the tomboy-list or on IRC in #tomboy. --SandyArmstrong

• February 27, 2007: For those who don't know, a few weeks ago we started a tomboy-portable branch in SVN. A main goal of the branch is to refactor Tomboy in such a way that creating and maintaining ports (like this one) is easier. Personally, I'd like to see side-by-side supported Linux/Win32 releases of Tomboy starting with 0.8.0. But here's the roadmap:

  • Now - Refactor Tomboy so that platform-specific code is isolated and 'swappable'. Code lives in tomboy-portable branch.

  • 3/14/2007 - 0.6.0 for Linux is released. Assuming the changes in tomboy-portable are accepted by the Tomboy maintainers, get those changes merged into the trunk. It would be really nice to get this in before feature work for 0.7.x begins.

  • Then - Once tomboy-portable is merged into the 0.7.x series, provide 'experimental' platform-neutral implementation that should run on Linux and Win32. Provide binaries for Win32.

    So with any luck, I'll have a much-improved Win32 port available in late March. Thanks for your patience. --SandyArmstrong

• February 3, 2007: The Tomboy port provided here will not work with Mono 1.2.3. This is actually due to some fixes in Mono 1.2.3 that will really improve Tomboy on Windows once I update the port. I plan to have something ready for release alongside Tomboy 0.6.0 and GNOME 2.18 (March 14, 2007). Until then, if you are using Tomboy on Windows, stick with Mono < 1.2.3. Thanks! --SandyArmstrong

• June 25, 2007: There is now a "tomboy-win32" branch in GNOME CVS. --SandyArmstrong

What Works?

• Creating and editing notes
• Searching notes
• Table of Contents (previously 'Recent Changes')
• An icon is installed in the system tray (shows up as blank area)
• The ExportToHTML plugin (watch out for illegal characters in file names, though)

• The NoteOfTheDay plugin (with support for template note)

• The Reminder plugin (version 0.9 tested)

What Doesn't Work?

• Deleting notes crashes tomboy (but it does delete the note... I have a fix but I don't think it's correct so it is not checked in)
• Spell-checking

• The icon in the system tray won't display as an icon (fixed in Mono >= 1.2.3)

• Translations
• Hotkeys (like Alt+F11, etc)
• The printing plugin (may be able to fix this with GTK+-2.10)
• The evolution plugin
• The fixed width plugin
• The galago presence plugin
• Probably other stuff that I just haven't noticed

How Do I Get It?

Requirements (VERY IMPORTANT)

• Mono for Windows installed with GTK#. Tested with 1.1.16, 1.1.15, and 1.1.13.8.

• Environment variables set properly. -- %MONO% needs to point to where you installed mono (recommend "C:\Mono"), %PATH% needs to be modified to also point at the Mono bin directory (eg, "C:\Mono\bin")

Installation

From Source

You can get the code from the tomboy-win32 branch of the tomboy module in GNOME CVS, and then build it using the top-level build.bat batch file. This should create a bin/ directory that will contain many files. Running bin/tomboy.vbs will get you going.

From the Installer (not always up-to-date)

Download and install tomboy-win32-0.3.5-0.exe. A shortcut will be installed in your start menu that runs tomboy.vbs for you. All I can say about this installer is "it works on my machine".

Your Comments and Ideas Here

Tomboy-on-Windows Comments/Ideas

• Should it say GNOME SVN rather than GNOME CVS. And point to http://svn.gnome.org/svn/tomboy/branches/tomboy-win32/, I didn't change the link on the Wiki directly as I am not sure? --ArchimedesTrajano

• Windows/word/outlook formatted copy/paste operation

• It would be awesome to see Tomboy 0.5 for win32 released soon!!!

  • I wasn't planning on doing any new releases until some Mono bugs are fixed. 0.5.0 is the first release in a while that has enough new features (that would work on Windows) to justify an update, though, so maybe I'll do one anyway? The amount of work to update isn't trivial so don't expect anything soon. --Sandy

  • Two weeks ago (Nov-9,2006) Mono 1.2 was released, they claim to have fixed hundreds of bugs and compatibility issues... although I guess not the ones you needed (or maybe tomboy does not compile on mono 1.2 yet) --Ar

    • I'm particularly interested in http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=79900 and related bugs, which were not fixed yet in 1.2. --Sandy

    • I'm interested in any new Tomboy release for Windows. It'd be cool if you guys could make releases for Windows concurrently with the normal one, but that might be asking a bit too much. --RogerClark

      • It's on the Tomboy/RoadMap for 0.8.0. So hopefully very soon, each 0.7.x release of Tomboy for Linux will be accompanied by a release for Windows. --SandyArmstrong

General Tomboy Comments/Ideas

• Tomboy/PlaceForNewIdeas

Credits

• Much of the work represented here is original code by Dmitry Kostenko, taken from http://free-soft.ho.com.ua/ (which seems to be down).