Ephyboy, The Epiphany Tomboy Extension

2011-12-27T01:12:10-05:00

Back in the day when I used to use Firefox, I fell in love with the Tomfox extension. It allowed you to create a new Tomboy note using the currently selected text of the webpage you were browsing, using the title for the title of the note and referencing the url as the source. This was great for me to document all the code and Linux commands I’d find scattered around the net.

Eventually, though, I got tired of Firefox, especially it’s load times, and switched to Chromium. You guessed it, Chromium sucked too. So back to Epiphany I went, and with the 2.30 version it is really quite a nice little browser.

Epiphany extensions are now done with Seed, the GTK javascript bindings, making it really easy to write new extensions. Plus, it has almost a complete GTK implementation via GObject Introspection. So getting my tomboy note maker dohicky back was really not that hard —aside from the lack of documentation. And thus, Ephyboy is born. It’s really quite simple:

Download the tarball, or zip.
Install the extension.
Enable the extension (no restart required!).
Select some text to add in your note.
Hit CTRL+Shift+B; Or, add the Tomboy Note button to the toolbar and click the button.

The extension will then create your note and open your note in Tomboy for review and/or further editing.

There is one thing to note. The extension works by making a DBus call to Tomboy to create the note so you have to have Tomboy open and connected to the bus for this to work. Usually not a problem as I have Tomboy start on log in.

Matt Read, Weblog

Ephyboy, The Epiphany Tomboy Extension