Tomboy is a
free and open-source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
desktop
notetaking app written for
Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...
,
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...
,
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
, and
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...
operating systems. Tomboy is part of the
GNOME desktop environment. As Ubuntu changed over time and its
cloud
In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...
synchronization software
Ubuntu One
Ubuntu One is an OpenID-based single sign-on service operated by Canonical Ltd. to allow users to log onto many Canonical-owned Web sites. Until April 2014, Ubuntu One was also a file hosting service and music store that allowed users to store ...
came and went, Tomboy inspired various
forks and clones. Its interface is a word processor with a
wiki-like linking system to connect notes together. Words in the note body that match existing note titles
become hyperlinks automatically, making it simple to construct a
personal wiki. For example, repeated references to favorite artists would be automatically highlighted in notes containing their names. As of version 1.6 (2010), it supports text entries and hyperlinks to the World Wide Web, but not graphic image linking or embedding.
Development of the original Tomboy software ceased in 2017. Starting in 2017 the development team rewrote the software from scratch, for ease of maintenance and installation, renaming it tomboy-ng. Tomboy-ng is written in
Free Pascal
Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) is a compiler for the closely related programming-language dialects Pascal and Object Pascal. It is free software released under the GNU General Public License, witexception clausesthat allow static linking against i ...
.
Features

Some of the editing features supported:
* Text highlighting
* Inline spell checking using GtkSpell
*
Automatic hyperlinking An autolink is a hyperlink added automatically to a hypermedia document, after it has been authored or published. Automatic hyperlinking describes the process or the software feature that produces autolinks. Segments of the hypermedia are identified ...
of Web and email addresses
* Undo/redo
* Font styling and sizing
* Bulleted lists
* Note synchronization over
SSH,
WebDAV
WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for concu ...
,
Ubuntu One
Ubuntu One is an OpenID-based single sign-on service operated by Canonical Ltd. to allow users to log onto many Canonical-owned Web sites. Until April 2014, Ubuntu One was also a file hosting service and music store that allowed users to store ...
, or the Tomboy REST API that is implemented by several server applications
Plugins
Tomboy supports several plugins, including:
*
Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
mail links
* Galago/
Pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...
presence
* Note of the day (disabled by default)
* Fixed width text
*
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
export
*
LaTeX
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosper ...
math (in the package , not installed by default)
* Print
Ports
* Conboy: a Tomboy port to the
Maemo
Maemo is a software platform originally developed by Nokia, now developed by the community, for smartphones and Internet tablets. The platform comprises both the Maemo operating system and SDK. Maemo played a key role in Nokia's strategy to c ...
platform written in the
C language
*
Gnote: a conversion of the Tomboy code to the
C++ language, but is not cross-platform
* libktomgirl: a platform-independent library that reads and writes the Tomboy File Format
* Tomdroid: an effort to produce a Tomboy-compatbile notetaking app for the
Android operating system.
See also
*
Comparison of notetaking software
References
External links
*
{{Notetaking software
Software that uses Mono (software)
Free note-taking software
Cross-platform free software
Free software programmed in C Sharp
GNOME Applications
Note-taking software that uses GTK
Personal wikis