hints and tips of the less obvious to get the most out of Xpad

 Welcome to Xpad, my friend!

Below some hints and tips of the less obvious to get the most out of Xpad. 

What is Xpad

Pads are basically sticky notes on your desktop in which you can write memos. Each Xpad session consists of one or more open pads. Pads are saved automatically. Each pad consists of three areas:

Top – Title bar / window decorations (optional)

Middle - Text area

Bottom - Toolbar (optional)

Each of these areas offer various options and preferences. Discover below some of them – and enjoy!

Generic options

You have two types of options. The general options, impacting all your pads, and the options specific to each pad.

Preferences

In the preferences you can manage your pads behavior such as appearances, what Xpad should do when you start your computer, enable/disable the tray icon. 

Open preferences: [Right-click in the text area] - [Pad] - [Edit] - [Preferences]

Open preferences: [Right-click on the Tray icon] - [Preferences]

Tray icon

The tray icon is an icon representing Xpad and offering different menus and options. It can be enabled/disabled in the preferences.

[Preferences] – [Enable tray icon]

Note that this might not work on all computers. Sometimes it is necessary to wait for the taskbar / panel to be loaded. There are two options which can help.

[Preferences] – [Wait for systray]

[Preferences] – [Delay startup]

A nice feature is that the behaviour of the left-click on the tray icon can be changed: do nothing, show/hide all pads, show the list of pads, and create new pad.

[Preferences] – [Tray left mouse click behaviour]

Toolbar

The toolbar offers buttons to quickly execute a command, such as Copy/Paste, New Pad, Delete Pad, etc. The toolbar can be disabled and/or autohide.

Add/remove buttons: [Right-click toolbar]

Enable/disable toolbar: [Right-click text area] - [Pad] - [View] - [Toolbar]

Automatically hide the toolbar: [Right-click text area] - [Pad] - [View] – [Hide Toolbar]

Scrollbar

The scrollbar can be enabled/disabled by the following way. When disabled, the size of the text area will grow when needed.

[Right-click text area] - [Pad] - [View] - [Scrollbar]

Window decorations

By default the window decorations, such as the title bar, minimize, maximize and close buttons, are hidden. This top bar is hidden to make makes the pad look more like an actual sticky note. See below how to move the pad without window decorations.

[Right-click text area] - [Pad] - [View] – [Window decorations]

Hide from taskbar or workspace switcher

If you have a lot of sticky notes, your taskbar might get filled with all these notes. In the preferences you can hide these notes from the taskbar, with a possible 

side effect that the notes will not be visible anymore in the task switcher (alt-tab). Also you can hide all the notes in the workspace switcher with the same 

possible side effect. Which ever option works best, depends on your preference and the desktop environment you use which is part of your Linux distribution (Mint, 

Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc). 

Show/hide pads

There are a couple of different ways to show and hide all pads in the same time.

[Right-click text area] - [Pad] - [Notes] – [Show All] / [Close All]

[Right-click tray icon] – [Show All] / [Close All]

[Left-click tray icon], this toggles the show/hide feature, if set in the preferences.

Per pad options

Color and font

Each pad can have its own color and font, or just follow the generic preference.

[Right-click in the text area] - [Pad] - [Properties]

Styling

A pad can contain different stylings: Bold, Italic, Underline and Strikethrough.

[Select text] - [Right click on it] - new options appear, specific for this piece of text.

Moving

There are multiple ways to move a pad around the desktop.

[Hold left-click on title bar]

[Hold left-click on toolbar]

[CTRL + left-click text area]

Resize

Each pad can be resized to the prefered size.

[Right-click and hold resizer] – the resizer is on the bottom right.

Shortcuts

F1: Help 

CTRL-Q: Quit 

CTRL-W: Close current pad

CTRL-A: Select All 

CTRL-Z: Undo 

CTRL-Y: Redo 

CTRL-N: New Pad 

CTRL-B: Bold 

CTRL-I: Italic 

CTRL-U: Underline 

SHIFT-DEL: Delete pad 

Please send ideas or bug reports to https://bugs.launchpad.net/xpad/+filebug