Personal Notes File

When you open a normal TXT file, NOTEFILE uses the first character in the first line (in other words the very first character in the file) as the Card Separator Character (see File Setup... command), so that subsequent lines starting with this character are put in different cards. For an example, look at the README.TXT file included in the notefile.7z file; it uses [ as the Card Separator Character.

There is no Modify Card command in NOTEFILE; the card you modified (including its index line) is updated automatically when you switch to another card. So, if you want to modify the index line of a card (and as a result, its position in the notes index list) just select the card you want to modify and change the first line in the notes information area; then, to update the notes index list, switch to another card or click on the same card in the notes index list.

When you start with a new empty file, NOTEFILE will display its main window using the default window coordinates. However, after you make changes to your file or modify the main window’s position and size, NOTEFILE will store the new specific window coordinates in the .ntf file itself. These values will not be updated later unless you make changes in the data and you save the .ntf file.

One solution is this:

1. Open NOTEFILE and your .ntf file;
2. Position the window as you like;
3. Modify some data, so that NOTEFILE will allow you to save your file;
4. Do File | Save to save the changes including the new coordinates into your .ntf file;
5. Close NOTEFILE;
6. Reopen NOTEFILE and your .ntf file (to do this in one step, create a shortcut as described in the Installation topic);
7. The window position will be the same as the one you changed in step 2.

Another shorter solution will be this:

1. Open NOTEFILE and your .ntf file;
2. Go to File | Setup and check the box named Reset main window geometry and click OK;
3. NOTEFILE will resize and reposition its main window to the default values;
4. Close NOTEFILE by saving your file;
5. Reopen NOTEFILE and your .ntf file and check window’s position and size.

Presently, you cannot print each card on a separate page as desired and the font used for displaying the data on the screen is used for printing too. However, you can do the following:

1. Start NOTEFILE and open your file.
2. Select File | Setup....
3. Click Set to Form Feed to set the Card Separator to Form Feed.
4. Click OK.
5. Select File | Save As....
6. Select Text File (*.TXT) from Save as type.
7. Give a name (and a path) in File name.
8. Click Save to save your notes file as a text file.
9. Start Microsoft® Word or any other word processor.
10. Select File | Open and open the newly created text file.
11. Select the whole file and change the font to whatever you like.
12. Print the file. An empty page may be printed in the beginning of the printout. If you want to avoid this, go to the first character of the file (use Ctrl+Home) and press Delete to delete the initial Form Feed character.

It is true that there is no such facility in NOTEFILE right now. But you can use the following method:

1. Open your .ntf file.
2. Go to File | Setup... and set the Card Separator to a special character like %.
3. Save your data file as an unencrypted and uncompressed .txt file.
4. Go to the directory where you saved your .txt file and open a Command Prompt.
5. Type

   >FINDSTR /b /l "%" yourfile.txt > indexfile.txt

   where YOURFILE.TXT is the file you created in step 3 above and INDEXFILE.TXT is a new file not present in that directory you are working with. (It is better to do all this work in a new directory.)
6. Open the newly created INDEXFILE.TXT with LibreOffice Writer or Microsoft® Word and delete all occurrences of the special character at the beginning of the lines.
7. Format and print the document.

A similar procedure can be used in Linux also: After opening a Terminal and going to the directory where you saved your file, use the following command in the shell:

$ grep "^%" yourfile.txt > indexfile.txt

From the File menu, select Clear Recent. All file names will be removed from the File menu.

Starting with version 2.03 of NOTEFILE, you have the option to delete a specific entry by holding SHIFT and clicking it.

On versions of NOTEFILE prior to version 2.03, in order to remove specific file entries, but not all, you had to delete them from the user configuration data. For example, for Windows it is the Windows Registry. Close any running instances of NOTEFILE; then run REGEDIT and go to the key:

\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\FedSoft\notefile

Then delete any of the four keys File1, File2, File3, or File4 having the values you do not want. Restart NOTEFILE and check the File menu. The usual Registry editing warnings apply; if you delete something important from the Windows Registry by mistake, you may make your Windows unusable!

For Linux, edit the file $HOME/.config/notefile/reg.xml and delete any of the lines containing File1, File2, File3, or File4 and having the values you do not want.

There is no limit on the .ntf file itself. However, a limit of 500,000 characters per card is imposed to prevent some problems.

NOTEFILE is actually donationware for personal use. There is no functional difference in the software whether you donate for a registration or not. The only difference is that if you do not register, you will get the This program is not licensed! startup warning from time to time asking you to register. For commercial usage and to get support from me, I will ask you to register. If you want to get a license for multiple users, you can donate for a site license.

When you donate for a license and enter the code to the program, the message in Help | Registration... dialog box changes to this: Licensed permanently to Your Name. Please refer to the Help topic for more information.

There is no reason why you can’t use NOTEFILE from a CD, floppy, or USB drive. You can store the NOTEFILE executable, your data file, or both on a removable medium. But, note that if you store your data file on a slow or read-only removable medium, you may wish to disable the automatic save feature of NOTEFILE by going to File | Setup... and setting Auto. save every: 0 minutes.

This may be a temporary problem. Please go to your favorite search engine and search for fedon kadifeli notefile -site:kadifeli.com. You should be able to find several backup pages. If you wish, you can contact the author to report the problem. Please be careful about sites that distribute malware!

In previous versions of NOTEFILE (i.e., ADDRFILE) Courier New 10pt was used for printing. However, the current version of NOTEFILE will print using the same font and size used for displaying text on screen. For this reason, it is a good idea to change the display font by using the File | Setup... command before printing.

In previous versions of NOTEFILE (i.e., ADDRFILE) the index window could only be resized by putting the mouse pointer between the index and the information area window and dragging the mouse left or right. Or you could double-click this area to set the widths to the default values.

However, starting with NOTEFILE (version 2.00) there is an option in File | Setup... that will allow you to reset the main window’s geometry to the standard default values. To do this, while you are on the main window of NOTEFILE you can use this sequence of keys: Alt+F, E, Alt+M, Enter. After that, you can make any further changes as described above. Do not forget to save your file.

Please note that the window size and position are stored in your data file. If you start a new data file (using File | New), your main NOTEFILE window will start with default values.

The previous major version of NOTEFILE (called ADDRFILE) was written using a Windows development environment and it used some Windows-specific libraries. So, it was impossible to port ADDRFILE to Linux without a complete re-write. I have tested and run ADDRFILE and NOTEFILE (for Windows) on Ubuntu Linux using the Wine compatibility layer which is provided for most Linux versions. With some very minor visual defects, NOTEFILE (or ADDRFILE) is expected to run properly under Wine. However, since it runs over a compatibility layer, it may be slower. To test it yourself, just copy the notefile.exe file to a Linux machine or download it from this page and (provided that the Wine package is installed on your machine) run the .exe file.

Since version 2.00, NOTEFILE was rewritten in Lazarus and starting from version 2.01 a native executable is now available for a 64-bit Linux graphical environment. However, the Linux version may contain some minor user interface bugs and may not behave exactly the same as the Windows version. Data files are fully exchangeable between the Windows and Linux versions of NOTEFILE.

NTF is a proprietary file format designed specifically for NOTEFILE. So there won’t be any software that can open an .ntf file created by NOTEFILE unless I develop one. Unfortunately, currently I do not have the necessary skills and means to develop an Android or iOS program. Who knows what will happen in the future? 😃

The automatic save feature of NOTEFILE periodically stores a copy of the notes file being edited to a temporary file in NTF format. Note that if the .ntf file has a password, then the temporary file will be encrypted too. The autosave file is saved in the same directory and with the same name as the .ntf file, but its extension is $$$ instead of ntf.

In case your computer crashes while NOTEFILE is running, the autosave file will contain more recent data than your .ntf file. You can recover the data saved by the automatic save feature when you try to open the original file. When you open a file, NOTEFILE checks whether a file with the same name, but with the $$$ extension exists. If so, you are given the option to open that file instead:

There is an autosave file with the same name. Do you want to open the autosave file instead of your data file?

If you want to keep the contents of this (autosave) file, you must decide on whether to save it over the original file or with a new file name and act accordingly.

Please note that if NOTEFILE was closed normally the last time, this message may indicate that another instance of NOTEFILE already has the same file open. In other words, you will get this message when you accidentally try to run a second copy (instance) of NOTEFILE and try to open a file which is already open on the other running copy of NOTEFILE.

For more information, please refer to the help topic for the File Setup... and the Open... command.

NOTEFILE data files appear to consist of completely random bytes, except for their first four bytes. If a data file is encrypted, it will start with the four ASCII bytes NTFE; and if it is not encrypted, with the bytes NTFU. So, if you go to your $HOME directory and create a file named .magic with the following contents, the file command will be able to detect NOTEFILE (and ADDRFILE) data files correctly:

0 string NTFE	Encrypted Personal Notes File, version 2.xx
0 string NTFU	Not encrypted Personal Notes File, version 2.xx
0 string \ ",CONFE	Encrypted Personal Address File, version 1.xx
0 string \ ",CONFU	Not encrypted Personal Address File, version 1.xx

If the .magic file already exists, you will have to append the above lines to it as appropriate.

When you save your file in TXT format NOTEFILE will use the Card Separator character. By default it is the Form Feed character. So, the program you use to open your TXT file may display each card in a separate page or add extra space between. You can change this character to any displayable ASCII character (greater than the Space character).