Improvement to Gnote extension

[rsyring]

@ManuelSchneid3r: I wasn't sure where to put this idea since it isn't a bug report or extension idea and it has to do with a Python extension which is in a different repo, but that repo doesn't have issues enabled. If this should be an issue, I'm happy to move this discussion to an issue.

The Gnote extension currently only works if Gnote is running. But, unlike Tomboy which had tray functionality and would keep a process open, by default the Gnote process closes when the window closes. That means, for a long time, I didn't think the Gnote extension worked because the notes never came up when I searched for them in Albert.

I finally had time to go look at the extension today and realized it wasn't working b/c it exits early if gnote isn't running. Options to improve the extension:

• Show the user a warning that says Gnote isn't running when they use the "gn" trigger but Gnote isn't running. Perhaps adding a note that they can run gnote --background at desktop startup to keep a Gnote process always running.
• Start the Gnote process using dbus start_service_by_name(...). Unfortunately, that results in using the --shell-search option which is undocumented and the processes exits after 30 seconds of inactivity.
• Start a Gnote process using the --background option to keep it always running.
• Give an option in the extension (can Python extensions have options?) to control this behavior.

I know Python really well and can submit a PR for the functionality if you are interested. I'd just like to know how you'd like to approach this so I don't waste time implementing a solution you don't like.

While I'm at it: how would you feel about adding the ability to search for or add notes in Gnote without using a prefix. So "some search term" vs "gn some search term"?

Thanks in advance.

[ManuelSchneid3r]

sorry for the late reply. i never really got into github discussions.

iirc none of the note plugins has been ported yet. they need maintainers. @rsyring if you are willing you could maintain it and do whatever you want to if it makes sense then. i stopped maintaining plugins I dont use. It just makes no sense because I have to get into stuff i dont use, build context knowledge users inherently have, test usecases i dont have and cant imagine and often had issues which i wasnt aware of simply because I dont use the plugin. thats a waste of time. most plugins are like 10 to 20 lines of code anybody could maintain. ill close this discussion since it probably will not make happen anything anyway.

I'd totally appreciate if you take care of gnote. porting it to 0.18 should be a breeze if you know python. see the docs. I tried to keep it lean. let me know if you encounter problems (either coding or understanding docs), since I really want to make it easy to write/port a plugin. if you want to maintain it simply send a PR to the python repo.