A blog

Three days ago I unplugged the mouse from my workstation and haven't looked back since. I've been using the xmonad as my window manager for the past couple years, but never felt like I was getting the full effects of the speed increase since I was still relying heavily on the mouse, so I decided to remove it and get tools that would allow me to work without moving my hands off the keyboard. I configured my browser to use ctrl+left/right to to change tabs. I configured sublime text to act the same, and also took some time to get more comfortable with it's shortcuts (particularly ctrl+p and ctrl+alt+p, I could write an article about how much those alone sped me up) and with gmail's shortcuts, and I am almost mouse free when browsing the internet. I changed my file manager and ftp client to Midnight Commander which finally gives me mouse free visual file browsing. There was just one thing left. I was working on a SQL query that was giving me weird results, using phpMyAdmin to run the query manually. I had an idea to fix the query, but I didn't want to lose the old query that I was working on (it had a lot of values that were generated from the php that I didn't want to generate again). A normal solution to this would be to open a gedit window, put the query there, then edit it in the browser to my heart's content. But gedit is a bit heavy for that job, plus I wanted to be able to access it from a different desktop without moving my gedit window around or saving the file. I needed something light and simple that would take my notes ad let me get them back whenever I wanted. I thought tomboy might do that, but it is too configurable for what I want. So I decided to create my own program to handle this. A little over 100 lines later, the result is Dropdown Notes. All this does is take your input and keep it for later, nothing more. It saves it to a file in it's config directory so it can load it up if you relaunch the program. If there is already an instance of the program running, it will kill that instance and pop up a new window. This is particularly nice on xmonad setups if you want to transfer the notes from one desktop to another without actually sending the window over, just open another instance and the other one will close, and now you'll have all your notes on your current desktop (I have it bound to mod+shift+n). My suggestion is to use this in an xmonad setup, making it float by default, which looks kinda like this: I also suggest using something to preserve your clipboard, like parcellite, otherwise whenever you reopen it, you will lose everything you copied from it earlier. More detailed information can be found in the relevant page in the projects section of this site.