tomboy starts with search dialog rather than as minimized in notification area

[Robert]

Binary package hint: tomboy

I have XUbuntu Feisty set up so that tomboy is an autostarted application.

Sometimes when it boots, tomboy is a minimized applet in the panel. Other times it starts in the search dialogue.

[Sebastian Dröge (slomo)]

It would only offer the search dialog on startup if there is already a tomboy instance running for that user...

[Robert (robrwo)]

What might cause a second instance to start sometimes?

[Sean Hodges (seanhodges)]

My guess on this is that you have "Automatically save changes to session" enabled in your Preferences->Sessions. This might mean that if you close your session with a Tomboy note open, it will attempt to re-launch Tomboy when you log-in again. Combined with having the Tomboy panel applet running already you will probably get the search dialog appear because the applet instance is already running when it attempts to restore the session.

Just a hunch, but seems feasible.

[Christer Edwards (christer.edwards)]

I just did some looking into this one. I was able to duplicate this bug by launching Tomboy after it was already launched. If Tomboy is already running it will cause the search to come up the second time. Also, the default Ubuntu (gnome) menu launches "tomboy --search" and will always load the search and the tray as well.

I'm not running Xubuntu so it's difficult to completely duplicate your settings but I would agree with Sean above. If you are saving your session changes *and* auto loading the tomboy app it may be trying to load it twice. If you try just one or the other does it persist? Can you validate that the 'sometimes' it loads the search are the times that it is running when you close the session and re-open the session?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Still an issue with tomboy 0.8?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!.

[Robert (robrwo)]

This bug has reappreard again in Hardy. I've removed my saved Xfce sessions, and checked that I do not save sessions on logout. But it still occurs, all of the time.

[Robert (robrwo)]

I've figured out the problem. Tomboy was also enabled for my Gnome sessions. Since I configured Xfce to launch Gnome services on startup, tomboy was running (even though the icon was not showing in the system tray).

I couldn't get the gnome utilities for editing the session to run within Xfce, so I had to log out, log in to Gnome, disable Tomboy, and then logout and log back in to Xfce again.

There are still some things wrong: other Gnome applications that are run inside Gnome sessions and also in Xfce on startup such as Beagle, Gnome Power Manager, Network Manager do not give warnings or weird behaviour that Tomboy does. What is different about Tomboy?

The bahviour of launching a search menu when it is already running is not intuitive. It should only do that if given a command-line option.

[txGreg (gspurr)]

FWIW - I have the same problem with Hardy, and had it in previous versions of Ubuntu as well. I am running Gnome, and don't have Xfce installed. I also do not have Gnome set to save my sessions upon logout.

If something else is running Tomboy besides the 'startup programs' section of the Session Prefs, I don't know what it is. If anyone has further suggestions, I'd be delighted to hear them.

[Robert (robrwo)]

Do you also have the tomboy applet?

2008/7/17 txGreg <email address hidden>:
> FWIW - I have the same problem with Hardy, and had it in previous
> versions of Ubuntu as well. I am running Gnome, and don't have Xfce
> installed. I also do not have Gnome set to save my sessions upon
> logout.
>
> If something else is running Tomboy besides the 'startup programs'
> section of the Session Prefs, I don't know what it is. If anyone has
> further suggestions, I'd be delighted to hear them.
>
> --
> tomboy sometimes starts with search dialog rather than as minimized applet
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/112703
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Arkhitekton (arkhitekton)]

I have had the same problem with Tomboy presenting the Search All Notes dialog box when it is launched. I am currently running Tomboy 0.10.2 on Ubuntu 8.04.1, Release: 8.04.

As part of the Global Bug Jam 2008 I've looked at this problem a bit further and have the following information:-

The Search All Notes dialog box is presented every time Tomboy is launched using the menu Applications -> Accessories -> Tomboy Notes. The applet appears in the panel.

Previously I had also right-clicked on the menu item Applications -> Accessories -> Tomboy Notes and clicked Add This Launcher To Panel. Launching Tomboy from the panel using this launcher also resulted in Search All Notes dialog box being presented every time. The applet appears in the panel.

However (following the instructions in the help) by right-clicking on the panel and then clicking on Add to Panel ... and selecting Tomboy Notes, the applet is installed immediately in the panel and the Search All Notes dialog box does not appear.

[txGreg (gspurr)]

sorry for the delay.

@Robert - I'm not sure I understand your question? The problem I was seeing was that my Gnome session would start up, and Tomboy would display the search dialog and not just be running minimized. I would close the search box, and the icon would be running in the tray as expected.

Now - note I used the word "was." Obviously the problem on my system was a personal one. After my earlier post, I played around a bit with using Emerald (and was still having the problem). I ended up bouncing back 'n forth a bit, and now I'm back to using Hardy with Compiz Fusion and the standard wm (forgot the name) instead of Emerald.

Somehow in that process, the problem has gone away for me... for now. I wish I could provide more info, but I'm drawing a blank so far.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Intrepid Ibex. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[ikus060 (ikus060-renamed)]

Yes, this bugs can be reproduce on Intrepid Ibex Live CD.

[Sam Douglas (sam-douglas32)]

This problem is currently present in Intrepid, I have investigated more; it seems to be caused by Tomboy launching before the notification area applet has loaded. If I remove the notification area from my panel configuration, Tomboy always starts with the search for notes dialog and the program exits when that is closed. This probably also explains why it happens for some people and not others. On my first log in after booting, Tomboy almost always starts in the 'non-persistent' mode; on subsequent logins, Tomboy almost always runs as expected in 'persistent' mode. This is probably caused by kernel caching or whatever when loading the panel applets.

On a brief look over Tomboy.cs, it is probably something to do with the program registering as a panel applet.

[Philip Peitsch (philip-peitsch)]

I can confirm that this problem seems to exhibit itself when the Tomboy program finishes loading before the gnome-panel does. This happens somewhat at random depending on how under load the start up session currently is. The more programs being loaded and tasks being performed, the more likely the search dialog is to appear.

The other side effect is that closing this window causes the tomboy instance to shutdown in the notification area as well. Re-opening tomboy again (e.g., alt+f2 and just doing 'tomboy' again) makes the instance correctly load up and minimize to the notification area upon close.

As a work around, I have made a quick shell script to delay the starting of tomboy by about 10s on start up. I've attached the startup script for the lazy. It's contents are very simple:
#!/bin/sh
sleep $1
shift
exec $@

The script needs to be made executable, and then I simply put the command in session as:
/path/to/delay/file/delay 5 /usr/bin/tomboy

The first argument is the delay required, and the rest of the command line is then passed to the exec process.

[Paul Koerbitz (paul-koerbitz)]

Hello!

I can confirm the behavior described in the previous posts (Tomboy starts up with search dialog on first boot, exits when the window is closed.) The above described workaround also works fine for me, now tomboy starts as panel applet every time.

Should this bug really be expired though? While it's not a major problem, I found it pretty annoying and it stands in the way for a smoother user experience.
regards
Paul

[Robert (robrwo)]

I confirm that this is still a problem in Jaunty.

[Shahar Or (mightyiam)]

I also confirm that this is still a problem in Jaunty.

[ChrisBE (cbe010)]

I am running 9.04, Tomboy 0.14.0 and have this problem, too.

[Michele Costantino Soccio (michelinux)]

I can confirm this bug in Jaunty with Tomboy 0.14.0

[Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstrong)]

There are two different issues here:

1) Launching Tomboy from the menus (not as a panel applet) brings up Search.

This is intentional. If you look at the tomboy.desktop file, you'll see that the command is "tomboy --search", which brings up the Search window. This is because most users launching an application from a menu expect a "main" window to come up. You can edit the file to remove "--search" if you don't want it.

An appropriate upstream bug to file would be changing this into a preference in our GUI instead.

2) If Tomboy starts up before the notification area in the GNOME panel, then closing the Search window quits Tomboy.

When Tomboy starts, if it does not see it's icon appear in the notification area within two seconds, it assumes there *is* no notification area, which means the user has no way to quit Tomboy except via the Search window. So we make closing the window quit Tomboy in this case.

A good upstream bug would be to re-check whether or not the Tomboy icon is in the notification area at the time when the user closes the Search window.

Please file these upstream. The second one I will fix ASAP, the first one I will try to get fixed soon.

[Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstrong)]

Oh, and I'd like to once again emphasize that running Tomboy as a GNOME panel applet gets rid of both of these issues.

[alex wu (alex-w-w-h)]

The ubuntu one sync doesn't work with the applet so I autostart tomboy at login.
The problem is that it always starts on search mode instead of minimized in the tray.
I'm using Karmic 9.10

[Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstrong)]

Alex, sync works fine with the panel applet, it's just that the applet doesn't have a right-click option for sync in 1.0.x. This was fixed in 1.1.x. You can still sync your notes from the Tools menu in each note, even in 1.0.x.

[Son (son.caokim)]

still having the issue with up-to-date Lucid Lynx beta

[Paul Natsuo Kishimoto (khaeru)]

Upstreamed the bug.

[Raphael J. Schmid (raphael-j-schmid)]

Paul: you say "upstreamed the bug". Does that mean you put it onto another bug tracker? If so, where?

[Paul Natsuo Kishimoto (khaeru)]

Raphael: yes, in GNOME Bugzilla, since Tomboy is a GNOME project and Sandy asked for someone to do so last June (in comment #26).

I filed https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=616140, but apparently that is a duplicate of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=473549, which is older than this bug. This is confusing, but anyway I hope it gets fixed soon.

[Sandy Armstrong (sanfordarmstrong)]

Yeah, sorry Paul, I didn't realize there was already a bug filed when I made my comment here.

[Dr. Kenobi (drkenobi)]

This is also affecting me. I can't believe they have not fix this problem. I set Tomboy as a Statup Application in Ubuntu 10.04, because is very easy to synchronize with UbuntuOne. And every time I log in, the search window appears.

[Raphael J. Schmid (raphael-j-schmid)]

Obi-Wan, please see upstream bugzilla here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=614795

[Dr. Kenobi (drkenobi)]

Raphael J. Schmid, the link you post is about another bug (Icon for tomboy in notification area is different from icon for tomboy applet). This bug is about another thing.

[Raphael J. Schmid (raphael-j-schmid)]

Sorry Master Jedi, my bad - I didn't pay due attention!

[Dr. Kenobi (drkenobi)]

It's ok Padawan, don't worry! haha

[Vish (vish)]

Upstream comment:
"Just because we set the .desktop file
to default to `tomboy --search`, that doesn't mean a user should have to much
with that file if they don't want to see the search window when they start
Tomboy. We should add a pref."

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

I'm able to reproduce the behavior that was originally reported by Robert, and I can confirm that delaying the launch as suggested by Philip in comment #20 prevents the "Search All Notes" window from being opened. Actually, a more straightforward way to delay the launch of Tomboy is to append a line to the .desktop file:

echo "X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=10" >> ~/.config/autostart/tomboy.desktop

Unfortunately you can't add that line via the GUI provided by
System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications

Anyway, I believe that whatever is needed to prevent the "Search All Notes" window from opening, it should better be fixed within the tomboy package.

To prevent confusion about the nature of this bug, I suggest that "when autostarted" is appended to the summary wording. Also, I believe that this bug is more important than just a wishlist item. The annoyance caused by an undesired window popping up at login may hurt the Ubuntu reputation.

[Henrique Ferreiro (henrique-ferreiro)]

Gunnar Hjalmarsson: that behaviour has been fixed in the patch appended in the last comment of bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=443655

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Thanks for letting us know, Henrique, that's progress indeed. Stefan Schweizer seems to have spotted what has actually caused this problem (for at least 3 years...).

But "fixed"? I see at http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/ that a development tarball was released a week ago. However, to me as an Ubuntu user the behavior has not been really fixed until Canonical provides a binary package that reflects those code changes, so that my system gets updated. ;-)

[TomasHnyk (sup)]

This does not seem to have been fixed.

[TomasHnyk (sup)]

By the way - to autostart minimized, set the autostar command to "tomboy --icon" - currently, it is "tomboy --search" (see tomboy.desktop on your system).

However, deciding this is hard - you want this to be --search for opening tomboy normally (as an application) but you want this "tomboy --cion" for autostart.

[TomasHnyk (sup)]

Ah, as per https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665532 , there is no --icon option, just starting it with "tomboy" should be enough.