Here’s a real simple way of using KNotes, in TDE, to capture information from your web browser for use in your other applications.
If you’re not familiar with it already, KNotes is a utility application that provides you with the ability to record simple notes and post/display them on your desktop in “sticky notes” fashion. There’s a couple of things that makes KNotes a little more convenient for note taking than using one of the many text editors you probably already have installed on your computer.
One advantage is that once launched, KNotes exists within your TDE toolbar, so you don’t have to launch it every time you wish you to record a note. Secondly, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to many of the note taking functions, making it even easier to use than having to start up your text editor program when ever a note-taking job arises. Third, you can also search each of your posted KNotes without having to open up any other .txt or other document file, which you would have to do with a standard text editor.
But, here’s a particular feature of KNotes that I wanted to share with you in this article: the ability to easily take notes from most any other document with a simple drag-and-drop with your mouse.
For example, let’s say that I’m surfing the Internet with my favorite web browser and I happen across some useful information that I want to save for referencing later. I can simply create a new KNotes and then (using the mouse pointer) highlight the text in my web browser I want to save, then drag it over to the blank KNotes and drop it in.
If you want to make the process even easier, you can assign a hot-key to KNotes’ command to make a “new note from clipboard”. On my system, I’ve assigned the new note command to ALT-P. So, now if I see something in my web browser I wish to save to a KNote, I simply highlight the text I want, press CTRL-C to copy it and then ALT-P to paste it into a new KNote. Can’t get much simpler than that!
This is just one of the helpful functionalities that lie within KNotes. It also has the ability to set an alarm to a note, in case you want to be reminded of something important. It also has some integration with KMail, so you can easily send your KNotes to other via e-mail. And if you need to create a KNote with more sophisticated formatting, it can also support rich text when needed.
KNotes is certainly more than just a desktop sticky note simulator, it really does have some useful note-taking functionality buried just under the surface.
