Notes-mode is an indexing system for on-line note-taking. Notes-mode is composed of two parts, the visible part, a major-mode for emacs to aid note-taking; and the invisible part, scripts which periodically index your notes for you.
For more information about notes-mode, you can consult the manual in HTML format, single-page HTML, or gzip’ed PostScript. Notes mode was also reviewed in the Linux Gazette by Larry Ayers (with a later follow-up).
Download notes-mode-1.31.tar.gz. (released 2018-06-06)
Notes-mode FAQs
(See also ``late breaking news’’ below.)
Q: I’ve installed notes-mode, but when I run it I have problems because the internal paths are all wrong (they have johnh’s in them). What’s wrong?
A: You’re running the distributed code, not the installed code. Please read the installation instructions carefully! You may find this annotated installation script helpful (thanks to Adrian Burd for contributing it).
Late Breaking News
1.31 released 2018-06-06 adds support for emacs-26.1.
1.30 released 2014-12-19 adds support for easypg in emacs-24.
1.29 released 2012-04-04 to fix some encryption bugs
1.28 released 2010-06-20
Bugs in 1.26
1.26 has problems if you use non-ASCII characters and use something other than utf-8. Really you should change to utf-8, but if you insist in using some other locale, upgrade to 1.27.
Bugs in 1.22
The mailing list location has changed. You may use the web to sign up at notes-mode-announce or notes-mode-talk.
Bugs in 1.21
1.21 has several notesinit problems fixed in 1.22
Bugs in 1.20
Running “mkall” for the first time will fail with an error about renaming. Work-around: create a dummy “rawindex” file (typically in ~/NOTES), perhaps with touch ~/NOTES/rawindex.
Bugs in 1.19
Missing notes-first.el (fixed in 1.20).
Bugs in 1.18
GPG encryption support doesn’t work in 1.18 release; apply this patch from Bill Perkins to fix it (thanks also to Knut Anders Hatlen for sending in a similar patch).
Bugs in 1.17
None found (yet).
Bugs in 1.16
1.16 has a y2k bug in mkindex (fixed in 1.17, or get the critical patch if you can’t upgrade.)
Two bugs reporeted by Thierry Bezecourt:
- the ‘configure’ script calls xemacs with options ‘-q -batch’ . It doesn’t work, because Xemacs tries to open a file named “-batch” . It works if you permute the options (‘-batch -q’), as indicated in the Xemacs man page. I don’t know how it works for other emacsen.
- the notesinit program asks for the location of the NOTES directory. However, it converts to lower case the path entered by the user. Is it really what you want to do ?
Apply this patch (notes-mode-1.16-two.patch) against 1.16 to fixes these problems.
Bugs in 1.15
6-Jan-98: If you’re running emacs-19, or if you get a message that ``paragraph-indent-text-mode is undefined’’ you’ll probably need to apply this patch.
4-May-98: Subjects with #’s in them break indexing with the message ``Index is not in sorted order’’. Apply this patch to fix the problem.
Bugs in 1.14
5-Jan-98: If you’re using mailcrypt encryption, you should apply this patch.
Please note that notes-mode supports both Rick Campbell’s emacs interface, PAM (PGP Augmented Messaging) (note that as of January 1997, PAM is no longer at this ftp site and appears to not be publically available) and LoPresti and Choi’s mailcrypt for encryption. (The manual distributed with 1.14 lists only PAM, although the release notes list both.)
Older versions in case you need to track down a bug: notes-mode-1.13.tar.gz released 24-Aug-96, notes-mode-1.14.tar.gz released 1-Jan-98, notes-mode-1.15.tar.gz released 5-Jan-98. notes-mode-1.23.tar.gz (released 20-Feb-05)