Scout : A CLI interface to Tomboy notes and Gnote
Scout is an interface to Tomboy notes or Gnote that uses DBus to communicate. It presents a command-line interface and tries to be as simple to use as possible. Different actions can be taken to interact with Tomboy or Gnote. Actions are simple to create, making the application easily extensible.
Current actions make it possible to list note names, display note contents, search for text inside notes and to delete notes.
To use scout the first argument must be an action name. For example, say you want to get a list of all non-template notes. You can call the following:
scout list
Arguments can be given to actions. The arguments available differ from one action to the other. For example, the "search" action requires an element to search for:
scout search "text to search for"
You can obtain help on how to execute scout by giving it a "-h" or "--help" argument. This will list the currently available actions you can use with scout. To obtain more detail on what arguments can be used with an action, use the option "-h" or "--help" and specify an action name at the same time. Both of the two following commands call the detailed help for the action "display":
scout --help display
# or:
scout display -h
Scout can be used with either Tomboy or Gnote. Scout detects which one of them is currently installed. If only one of them is present, it will automatically connect to it.
However, in a context where both Tomboy and Gnote are installed, Scout cannot determine which one to use unless it is specified as an argument to the command line or in a configuration file.
A system-wide configuration file can be placed in /etc/scout.cfg. Each
user can also create a configuration file in their home directory (e.g. either
~/.scout/config or ~/.config/scout/config). Values in the user
configuration file will override those set in the system-wide configuration.
The configuration file should follow the Windows INI file format. To select the
application, the "application" option in the "scout" section should be set to
either Tomboy or Gnote. Ex. (Tomboy):
[scout]
application: Tomboy
The command line argument takes precedence over the value set in the configuration file. Here's how to list notes from Gnote:
scout list --application=Gnote
You need to have libdbus installed in order for the dbus-python library to
be useful. In theory, though if you have already installed Tomboy or Gnote
beforehand you should already have this library on your system.
You also need your note application to be running, otherwise you might be getting errors about the dbus interface not existing.
Also, for pip to be able to install dbus-python, you need dev libraries to be
present on your system. In debian you can install them with:
sudo apt install libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev
This project is setup to be used with pip so you can install it and/or build
a wheel as you would normally do with that tool.
To see a short summary of what has changed between versions, consult the changelog wiki page.
All contributions to the code are welcome. Contributed code should come with new unit tests for added functions and new or modified acceptance tests for command line interface modifications. The main repository is on GitHub. Send patches to the [mailing list] (See the section about the list for more details).
Commit messages should contain a "Signed-off-by:" line with you name and e-mail address, in the same fashion as contributions to git or the Linux kernel. This line attests that you are willing to license your code under the same license as the one used by the project (e.g. BSD). To add such a line with git, use the "-s" argument to git-commit.
The recommended way to have a development environement is to create a python virtualenv as shown below:
python3 -m venv ve
source ve/bin/activate
Then in the venv install scout in "develop" mode and its dependencies with pip so that you can test it while developing:
pip install -e .[test]
tests are run using pytest. From the base directory, with the venv activated:
pytest
You can disable running the functional (or integration) tests by filtering out the marker (or by dropping the "not", run only those tests):
pytest -m "not integration"
Scout can be used, distributed and modified. All files are under a BSD-4-clause license.
A copy of the BSD license should be available with the source code. Also, a short license notice can be found in all files.