CintaNotes is a small and easy to use personal note management application. It is designed to be your indispensable assistant in the daily task of collecting numerous pieces of information, whatever they may be: your own thoughts and ideas, book and article excerpts, job postings, famous quotes, research data, curious facts, Wikipedia definitions, blog posts, important news, you name it.

It lets you quickly jot down and tag any piece of useful information that you come across while reading documents or surfing the Net – just select the text and press Ctrl+F12. With CintaNotes, this is really all it takes to make a note! CintaNotes does not clutter your desktop with “sticky notes”, all notes are neatly organized in an easily navigable list. And unlike browser-based tools like Google Keep or Firefox plug-ins, CintaNotes does not require a web browser to work – it works with Microsoft Word, Outlook, Adobe Acrobat – the “text-capturing magic” works with all applications that can copy text to the clipboard!

Retrieving information is also trivial: just open CintaNotes and start typing, and only notes which contain the text you type will remain in the list. More sophisticated search criteria are also supported, like searching by title or by URL the note was taken from.

CintaNotes is a totally portable application, meaning that you can put it on a flash drive and run it directly from there – in this way, your notes will always be with you.

CintaNotes runs under Microsoft Windows® XP and above.

Installation

To install CintaNotes:

1. In your web browser, click the link to the program.
2. To install the program immediately, click “Open” or “Run”, and then follow the instructions. If you’re prompted by Windows User Access Control for an administrator password, type the password.
3. Click “Next” and then accept the end-user license agreement.
   
4. Select the folder where CintaNotes will reside (“Program Files\CintaNotes” by default). You can choose a different folder by clicking the “Browse” button.
   
5. Then you’ll be asked for the Start Menu folder name. You’ll only want to change it if you already have the start menu folder with this name, e.g when installing multiple instances of CintaNotes.
   
6. After the installation is complete, click “Launch CintaNotes” and then “Finish” to get rolling.
   

Please pay attention that if you install CintaNotes into the Program Files folder, your note data and program settings will be stored separately in “%APPDATA%\CintaNotes“. Simple copying of the application folder will copy just the application itself, without your data. You can find and copy your data files manually.

CintaNotes can also work without installation. For your convenience there also is a portable version of CintaNotes available for direct download from the official site, which doesn’t contain an installer.

License

By default, CintaNotes is installed under the terms of the Basic (Free) License, but during the initial 10 days a PRO trial is activated so that you can try out PRO features. These features include:

• Password protection
• File Attachments
• Autotagging rules
• Multiple notebooks support
• More than 3 tabbed sections
• Linking notes with each other
• Tag hierarchy and expandable tag tree
• Exporting notes to HTML format
• Pasting notes into other applications

After the initial 10 day trial is over, you can request an extended 30-day trial key that will arrive to your email.

You don’t have to download a separate package after purchasing a license. There is just one distribution of CintaNotes. Registering a license unlocks premium functionality in the program that is already installed. The PRO license is intended both for non-commercial and commercial (business) environments.

To obtain a PRO License, select the License command from the Help menu. The “Buy Key” button in the License window will take you to the online order page.

After your order is processed, you will receive your registration key by email (usually takes several minutes, but in extremely rare cases can take up to 12 hours). You can enter the registration details into the Help/License window in one of three ways:

• Option 1: Select the whole purchase confirmation email text, and clip it using the configured clipping hot key (Ctrl+F12 by default) – this is the recommended approach;
• Option 2: Copy the email content to clipboard and then open the License window;
• Option 3: Click the “Enter New Key” button and manually enter the registration details.

CintaNotes is licensed per user, so you can use the same license key on all your PCs. But the license key needs to be registered on every PC separately.

Updating CintaNotes to newer versions

CintaNotes automatically checks for updates and indicates to you that a new version is available with a yellow information bar under the main menu. Click on this bar to download the new version package.
You can also check for updates manually with the Help/Check for Updates command. The same window allows you to turn off the automatic update check in case you don’t want to be notified.
After downloading the updated package, usually all you need to do is point the installer to your CintaNotes folder.

To update the portable version, unpack the archive and copy the new files over the old content of the CintaNotes folder.

Updating a registered version of CintaNotes (i.e. with a PRO License) will automatically transfer the license key to the new version. Unless you’ve purchased a Lifetime PRO license, your license key will be valid only for CintaNotes versions released during the 12 months since the date of purchase. If you update to a version released after this date, it will run with PRO features disabled. In order to continue using the PRO features, you will have to either go back to an earlier CintaNotes version, renew your license and extend your updates subscription for another year, or upgrade to a Lifetime PRO license.

CintaNotes provides you with several ways to take notes. You can enter notes manually, clip text from other applications, or paste text from clipboard.

Entering notes manually

Open CintaNotes and select the “New Note” command from the “Edit” menu (or just press the Ins key or Ctrl+N). CintaNotes creates a new note and displays the note editor. In this window you can enter a note’s title, text, tags, link and also add some additional remarks.

The note’s Link is just some URL associated with the note, e.g. “http://cintanotes.com“.

The link can be entered manually, but most of the time it is filled automatically on clipping text from other applications (see next section). If CintaNotes recognizes the contents of the “Link” field to be a valid URL, it displays it as a clickable link. Clicking on this icon will open the URL in your default browser. (Note: The URL can also be a link to a file on your computer, in which case CintaNotes will attempt to open that file in the default application for that file type.)

There is also a “Browse Link” command in a note’s context menu, which enables you to browse the note’s URL without opening the note editor.

The “Tags” field is used to categorize notes (see “Using tags to categorize notes” section below).

The “Remarks” field is intended as a place for additional information. Oftentimes the main note text is clipped from somewhere, and in the Remarks field you can specify some notes to yourself. Please note that the height of this field adjusts automatically to the amount of text you enter into it, but you can also adjust it manually via dragging the lower edge of the main text area with the mouse.

None of these fields are required and may be left blank. After you’ve entered the information you want to keep, press “OK” (or Ctrl+Enter) to add the note to your notebook.

Clipping text from other applications

Entering notes manually is great if you want to write down some brilliant ideas of your own, but often you will just want to store a piece of information you’ve found somewhere else. This is a case where CintaNotes really shines.

Provided CintaNotes is running in the background (usually it will reside in the system tray), all you need to do is mark the text you want to store and press Ctrl+F12. Et voilà! CintaNotes’ main window pops up, focused on the new note with the text you’ve just selected. Some fields besides text are also filled automatically – the title of the source application window is taken as the note’s title, and if you clip text from a web page, the note’s Link field automatically receives the URL of the page from the address bar of your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari are supported).

At this moment you might want to edit the new note to add remarks to it or tag it. Pressing Esc minimizes CintaNotes and you can continue reading where you left off.

Pasting notes from the clipboard

CintaNotes also supports direct text pasting from the Windows clipboard. Select the “Paste” command from the “Edit” menu or press Ctrl+V. CintaNotes creates a new note with the text from the clipboard. It also tries to determine which application has put the data into the clipboard, and if successful, it uses the application window title as the note’s title. Unfortunately, reliable clipboard data source detection is not always possible, and when CintaNotes fails to find the source window, the first line of the pasted text becomes also the note’s title.

If you are pasting a note that was inserted to the Clipboard from CintaNotes, the Title, Tags and date information will be copied from the original note in addition to the note content.

It is recommended that you use clipping instead of clipboard pasting as much as possible, because in the former case more data can be filled automatically for you.

Editing notes

You can go back to edit any note at anytime – just double-click on it, or highlight it and press the Enter (or F2) key.

For the main note content, CintaNotes supports basic text formatting with the help of the Format pop up submenu. Bold, italics, underline, strikeout, monospace and highlighting are supported. Also you can make bulleted and numbered lists.

Deleting notes

Deleting notes is also straightforward – select the notes you want to delete, and press the Delete key (or select “Delete” from the “Edit” menu or the note’s context menu).

By default, deleted notes go into the Recycle Bin, which belongs to the notebook and is accessible from the File menu. But you can also delete notes permanently with the Shift+Del shortcut.

Take care when deleting notes permanently, CintaNotes currently does not provide the possibility to undo this operation.

Merging notes

Quite often when you are reading some long text and making notes along the way, you end up with a whole bunch of short notes on the same topic. But in many cases what you really want is just one note with all the text you’ve collected so far.

In CintaNotes you can merge such notes together via selecting all of them and choosing the “Edit/Merge” command (or pressing Ctrl+M). The selected notes will be merged into one.

The “Merge” command is also accessible from the note’s context menu. It is enabled only when two or more notes are selected.

Editing note properties

When you select the “Properties” menu item from the note’s context menu (or press Alt+Enter), CintaNotes displays the note properties window. With this window you can edit the note’s timestamps, and see the note’s text size in KB.

The same window is accessible from the note editor when you click on the timestamps.

Simple search

By default, CintaNotes displays all notes which are in the notebook, organized in a list. You can enter a search query to limit the display to the notes satisfying the query. To begin entering the search string, just start typing in the main CintaNotes window. The focus will go to the search box, and the note list will be updated as you type.

When you search, CintaNotes highlights parts of notes which matched your search. Additionally you can use the F3 and Shift+F3 keys on the focused note’s text preview to navigate forward and backward through the highlighted matches (the same keys also work in the note editor window for searching selected text).

Search strings are not case-sensitive. To reset the search filter and go back to the full list, click the ‘X’ (close) button inside of the search box, or press Esc. Adding a new note will reset the search filter as well.

Search query syntax

The following search query syntax is supported by CintaNotes:

• word1 word2 matches all notes that contain both words in any order;
• word1 -word2 matches notes that have word1 but do not have word2;
• word1 word2|word3 matches notes that have word1 and have either word2 or word3;
• "word1 word2" will display only notes that contain the verbatim string “word1 word2”;
• different combinations of the above also work: "word1 word2" | word3 -word4 will
  display notes without word4 which have either “word1 word2” or word3.

This extended query syntax works only for note title and text.

If you’d like to limit the search to only certain data fields, CintaNotes has a number of search modes which allow you to do exactly this.

In the “Anywhere” mode, which is the default, CintaNotes includes all fields in the search. The following additional search modes are available:

Searching inside words

By default, CintaNotes searches only from the word boundaries. This means that e.g. when you search for nation, notes containing the word “international” won’t be found. If you want to search also inside of words, you need to activate the “Search inside words” option by clicking on the magnifying glass icon (or simply right-clicking) in the search box, and selecting the “Search inside words” item from the drop-down menu.

The “Search inside words” option makes search much slower, especially when the number and size of notes is large. So it is best to use it only when you can’t find what you need with the default search.

Searching across field boundaries

By default, all search terms must be inside of one field to produce a match. For example, when you search for “foo bar”, notes which have “foo” in the title and “bar” in the Link field won’t appear. But if you activate the “Search across field boundaries” option in the search context menu, the note will be found. This is because when this option is on, the search operates as if all selected fields were joined into one text field, which is searched.

Note that searching across field boundaries is not active by default since it negatively impacts search performance. Like searching inside words, it’s best to use this option only on an as-needed basis.

Searching with Wildcards (PRO)

CintaNotes allows you use the * and ? symbols in search queries to specify word parts that can be matched by any symbols. To use this function, you need to activate the “Use * and ? Wildcards” option in the search box menu.

The “?” wildcard symbol means “any one in-word character”, whereas the “*” symbol means “zero or more of any in-word characters”.

For example, to find all words that begin with “un” and end with “able”, activate “Use * and ? Wildcards” option and type “in*able”. CintaNotes will match “unable” and “unbelieable”, but won’t match “runnable” unless “Search Inside Words” is tuned on.

CintaNotes displays a note’s text directly in the notes list. The number of the text lines which are displayed is controlled by the Options/Notes List window.

If a note’s text is too long to fit into the preview, a small arrow indicator is displayed in the lower right corner. With the Left and Right arrow keys you can scroll the currently focused note’s text directly in the preview. The indicator by default points right, indicating that pressing the Right arrow key will show more text. After you start scrolling, it will change to a double-sided arrow when there is text both before and after the visible segment, and finally, to a left arrow when you reach the end.

Pressing Ctrl+Left or Right arrow keys scroll the text by page. You can also “pin” the note using spacebar (or left mouse click), and then the preview text can be scrolled with all usual navigation keys or the mouse wheel.

If you want to read the note more comfortably, you can press ‘Enter’ or ‘F2’ to open the note in the editor.

Using Tags to categorize Notes

When you take notes every day, having all of them in a single list becomes unmanageable very quickly. Note tags are used to address this problem. While editing a note, you can specify any text in the note’s “Tags” field. Later you can use part of this text to quickly filter out notes which don’t contain it in their “Tags” field, thus greatly narrowing down your search.

For example, you might decide to tag notes as a ToDo list with a “ToDo” tag. So every time you take such a note, you put “ToDo” into the “Tags” field. After that this tag will appear on the Tag Sidebar (see the screenshot below), so you will be able to highlight it, and CintaNotes will display just your ToDo notes. Alternatively, you can turn on Tag Search (see “Finding notes” section) and type “ToDo” as your search string.

If you want to associate two or more tags with a note, just put them all into the “Tags” separated by spaces (comma and semicolon can also be used but will be automatically converted to spaces).

Tags can include symbols, not just alphanumeric characters, i.e. “#1!” is a valid tag. Remember also that tags are not case-sensitive.

Tag names cannot include spaces, but you can make multi-word tags using different casing (like this: “MultiWordTag”), underscore (“Multi_word_tag”) or hyphen (“Multi-word-tag”).

It is possible to tag several notes at once: just select them and press F4 (or select the Tag… command from the context menu).

The Edit/Replace Tags command allows tag renaming, splitting, merging and deleting. Generally, each tag specified in the first edit box is replaced with all tags from the second edit box.

Tag auto-completion

In any tag-entering field CintaNotes displays a drop-down list of available tags as soon as you start typing. Pressing Spacebar, Enter or Tab accepts the currently highlighted suggestion, whereas Esc or Del cancels it. You can also force auto-complete display by pressing Ctrl+Space.

Using the Tag Sidebar

Tag Sidebar is a handy tool for fast access to different tags and tag sets.

The sidebar is not displayed by default; you can turn it on using the View/Tag Sidebar menu command.

There is a list of clickable labels on the sidebar. The first two labels are “All” and “Untagged”, which are predefined and cannot be changed. When you click on the “All” label on the sidebar, you make sure that no tag filter is applied. The “Untagged” label will display only notes having no tags.

Here’s an example of using CintaNotes for creating a small dictionary with technical terms:

The Untagged label is your natural note inbox which gives you quick and convenient access to recently captured information that needs to be categorized (provided you are using tags, of course).

Directly below is the list of all tags defined in the notes. This list displays all tags in alphabetical order. If the list is long and doesn’t fit, two scroll buttons appear (you can also scroll this list using the mouse wheel, and this is probably the most convenient way).

To the right of each tag is the number of notes in the current notebook which have that tag applied. This allows you to easily see which tags are underused and can be merged or removed. Tag count display can be turned off in Options / Tags menu.

Clicking on a tag activates it, and only notes having this tag will be displayed. Using Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click, you can expand the tag selection to additional tags. Keep in mind that with Ctrl+Click, a tag intersection is used when multiple tags are selected (i.e. notes having all of the selected tags will be included), whereas with Shift+Click, a tag union is used (i.e. notes having any of the tags will be included).

There is also a possibility to exclude (subtract) tags from the set via Alt-clicking on them. The excluded tags will show as strikeout with a bluish background. Only the notes which have been selected via tag union or tag intersection tags, and which additionally don’t have any of the excluded tags, will be shown in the list.

Tags selected in tag union mode have a yellowish highlight, whereas tag intersection tags will have the normal white highlight. The three modes are mutually exclusive.

Here you can see a typical tag intersection. Only notes which have both tags “en” and “review” are selected:

Entering tags into the search box also implies tag intersection. The difference here is that
you don’t have to use your mouse, and that you don’t have to enter complete tags.

There are also some advanced commands:

Ctrl+Alt+Click crosses out all tags except the clicked one, to display
notes having this tag only and no other tags:

Shift+Alt+Click crosses out all children of a parent tag, to display notes having this parent tag but not having any of the child tags (see the Tag Hierarchy section for more details about parent and child tags):

Tags which are related to any tag of the currently selected set are displayed in a blue color. Two tags are considered related if there are notes which have them both:

Each tag label on the Tag Sidebar has a right-click context menu which allows you to rename or delete a given tag. When multiple tags are selected, you can merge them as well:

Tag List Filters

The list of tags can be filtered to make it easy to work with many tags. In the Tag Sidebar’s context menu, there are three options for tag filtering:

• No Tag Filter – all tags from all sections are displayed;
• Only Used – only tags used in the currently selected sections are displayed, that is, tags having
  the use count greater than zero;
• Only Related – only tags related to the current tag selection are displayed. As you switch selected tags, the tags are updated to display only related ones. Two tags are related if there exists a note which has both of them. (So by definition these are tags which have a use count greater than zero.)

It is also possible to activate the “Only Related” mode by double-clicking the tag name. But since this collides with the usual tree collapse / expand actions, you need to enable this explicitly via setting the “app.mainframe.tagsidebar.doubleclick.onlyrelated” parameter of the cintanotes.settings file to 1.

Editing tag properties

To view and edit the properties of a tag, right-click it in the Tag Sidebar and select “Properties”.

Auto deleted – When this option is set, tags will be automatically deleted when there are no more notes with this tag. Tags created via the “Tags” field of the note editor have this option set by default.

Expanded by default – Applicable to parent tags only. When this option is set, the tree branch will be automatically expanded when the notebook is loaded. This enables you to keep commonly-used child tags always visible.

Tag Hierarchy

To further enhance the organization of your notes using tags, tags can be organized into a hierarchic structure.
Such a tree-like structure is very useful for creating various taxonomies.

Why should you organize your tags into a tree? There are two main benefits derived from organizing tags into trees:

1. You can easily generalize and specialize tags. For example, where you might use the tags todo, reply, and watch, you can instead use todo/reply and todo/watch. todo becomes a parent tag in this case. By selecting this tag on the sidebar, you can see all the things you need to do, regardless of the type of action that needs to be taken. Without tag hierarchy, you would need to select all these tags one by one to get the same result.
2. When you have a lot of tags, it quickly becomes difficult to manage them and to find them on the sidebar. If your tags are organized into groups by parent tags, you can easily locate the tags you need.

Creating a tag hierarchy is simple. Just create tags with forward slashes in their names, for example Cars/SportCars/Ferrari, Projects/MyProj1 or GDP/Europe/UK. To create a hierarchy from existing tags, rename them (e.g. rename SportCars to Cars/SportCars and Ferrari to Cars/SportCars/Ferrari).

Due to the parent/child relationship, when you add a tag such as movies/comedy to a note, two tags are actually added: movies and movies/comedy. And when you delete a tag from a note, any child tags are deleted from that note automatically.

Tags are always referred to by their full name (with all parent tags as a prefix), so you can’t write comedy and expect CintaNotes to understand that you really mean movies/comedy. This might seem limiting at first, however in reality it is not, since with tag auto-complete you don’t have to write these long tag names by hand. For example, to enter movies/comedy, you type “co” or “com” and then select movies/comedy from the suggestions list.

The most important thing to understand about tags in CintaNotes is that when tag A is a parent, and tag B is its child, tag B is really called A/B and in all places will be referred to as such. Tag B would refer to a tag named simply B (i.e. on the top hierarchy level). This means that both tags B and A/B can exist at the same time, but are different tags.

Moving tags around the hierarchy is accomplished by renaming them. Renaming tags is done by right-clicking
on the tag in the Tag Sidebar and selecting the “Rename” option from the menu.

Example 1: Given the tag hierarchy A/B/C, to move tag C to the top level, rename A/B/C to C.

Example 2: Given the tag hierarchy A/B/C, to move tag C to the second level, rename A/B/C to A/C.

Example 3: Given the tag hierarchy A/B/C, to make tag A the child of some other tag D, rename A to D/A (note that children of A will be renamed automatically, so the whole hierarchy will become D/A/B/C).

New child tags can be created by right-clicking on the tag that you want to be the parent in the Tag Sidebar and selecting the “New Child” option from the menu. (Note that this is a convenience option, since the same can be done via selecting the “New…” entry of the Tag Sidebar context menu and specifying the full child tag name.)

Tag hierarchy is supported in all license options of CintaNotes. However, the tag hierarchy tree view is only available to PRO License holders. This allows you to view your tag relationships as trees, with parent nodes at the top and child nodes beneath. You may collapse branches so only the parent tags are visible, enabling you to keep your Tag Sidebar with less clutter.

When using the Basic (Free) License, tags are shown in the Tag Sidebar with their full names.

CintaNotes remembers each search that you do, so that you can always go back to any search result. Two commands are available directly next to the search box: Back and Forward buttons, represented as arrows. They work like the similar commands in any web browser, moving you back and forth through the history of your searches.

To use the “Go Back” command from the keyboard, use the Backspace key, or Alt+Left combination. The Forward command is available with Shift+Backspace or Alt+Right.

Search history includes the contents and settings of the search box, and also the current tag and section selection. Please note that each section has its own search history. Even if you include additional sections with the current section selection (by Ctrl+clicking on section tabs), it becomes part of the active section’s history only.

Sort settings are not recorded in the search history since they don’t influence which notes are found, but only change their order.

You can view the whole search history by right-clicking on either the Back or Forward button. This way you can jump directly to the search that you want, without having to click through them all. Also, here you have the command to clear the history.

The “View History” command can be activated by the Ctrl+Shift+Backspace key combination.

CintaNotes supports sorting notes by title, creation and modification date, link, and size. “Manual” sort mode designates user-defined sorting – this is the only sorting mode where note-moving commands are available. You can also select the direction of the sort using the “View / Reverse Order” menu option.

Sorting commands are available directly from the toolbar. The control to the right of the search filter box controls the current sorting mode. You can click the icon (of horizontal bars) to the left of the sorting mode to toggle the sorting direction, or click on the field name to pick another sorting criterion. The same commands are also located in the “View/Sort By” menu.

If the current sort mode is set to “Manual”, you can reorder selected notes using the Alt+Up and Alt+Down keys. Additionally, it is possible to move notes to the very top of the list (Alt+Home) or to the very bottom (Alt+End). Any moving command is also accessible from the context menu, as well as from the main Edit menu.

About Notebooks

CintaNotes stores all the notes you take in a notebook file. On first run, CintaNotes will create a notebook file called “cintanotes.db” in the install location (or the location of the executable if using the portable version).

If you’ve installed CintaNotes into the “C:\Program Files” folder, the files cintanotes.db and cintanotes.settings will be located at the following path: C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Roaming\CintaNotes\. This is because, according to Microsoft’s guidelines, applications should not write into the Program Files folder (with the obvious exception for installers).

You may create new notebooks using the File / New command, and open existing notebooks using the File / Open command. In addition you can save copies of Notebooks using the File / Save As command.

Working with Multiple Notebooks

Multiple Notebooks is a commercial feature available only to PRO license holders.

If you have purchased a PRO License you can have multiple notebooks always at your fingertips. Each time you create a new notebook file or open an existing notebook file, that notebook file will be added to the
CintaNotes File menu. To switch between notebooks is then simply a matter of selecting the notebook file from
the File menu. As a further time-saver, the notebooks are numbered, allowing you to use keyboard shortcuts—so typing Alt+F, 2 will change to the second notebook in the list. A notebook can be removed from the list by opening that notebook and selecting the File / Close menu item.

This allows you to keep separate notes for different research projects you may be working on. It also allows you to share some notebooks, so that in the case of a PRO License, you may have your own notebook and a shared corporate notebook.

Be sure to check which notebook you are working with: the notebook name is provided in the title bar of the main CintaNotes window (but only when the name differs from the default “cintanotes.db”). It is also important to note that when you add a new notebook, the numbering of the notebooks can change.

To move or copy one or more notes between notebooks, simply use the Cut (Ctrl+X) or Copy (Ctrl+C) command on the notes you want in the open notebook, then switch notebooks and use the Paste (Ctrl+V) command. CintaNotes maintains all the note information, including tags and dates, during this operation. The same operation can also be used to duplicate notes in the current open notebook if needed.

The Basic (Free) License limits the number of notebooks in the File menu notebook list to one: the one which is currently active.

About sections

Any CintaNotes notebook consists of one or more sections. Sections represent a disjointed set of notes—that is, notes which you’d like to keep separate, but still in the same notebook.

Sections in a notebook are represented as tabs on the Section Bar, which is located near the top of the primary CintaNotes window, right below the main menu. When CintaNotes creates a new notebook, it also creates a section called “Main”. Right-clicking on a tab in the Section bar brings up a context menu which contains all section-related commands.

The Create New Section command adds a new section to the notebook. In the dialog box that comes up, you need to specify the name of the new section. Each new section is assigned a random color; you can change the section’s color by clicking on the little colored box beside the “Color” field in the “Create Section” dialog window.
Please note that the final tab color can differ from what you’ve picked: to ensure comfortable brightness and contrast levels, only the hue of the selected color is used.

To rename a section, or to change its properties, use the Properties command in the section tab’s context menu.

Deleting a section is possible through the Delete command of the same menu, or via pressing Ctrl+Shift+Del. Be aware that all notes the section contains will be deleted and unrecoverable! If you want to delete the section but keep the notes, you should first move the notes to another section via selecting them and executing the Edit/Move/To Section command (Shift+F6).

You can change the position of the section tabs with the Move Left (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Left Arrow) and Move Right (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Right Arrow) commands.

Using sections

Sections should be used for unrelated sets of data when you want to create a distinct separation. Here are a few examples of correct section usage:

• Separating private notes from notes related to work;
• Keeping notes about different work projects distinct from each other;
• Creating a temporary “place of chaos” for collecting information on a specific topic, which you
  don’t want to mix with your notes and intend to process later;
• Variations of the above.

In other cases it would probably be better to use tags.

Section view state

In CintaNotes, each section maintains its own view state, which includes note sorting order and tag selection. (Note that search parameters are not considered part of a section’s view state and are shared between sections.) When you switch between sections, the view state parameters are saved and restored on the fly. This enables you to define the most convenient sorting order for each section, or create a predefined tag selection which will be activated each time you switch to that section.

Selecting multiple sections

What do you do if you want to find something, but you don’t remember which section it was in? What if you need to temporarily combine notes from two sections?

CintaNotes solves these problems via supporting multiple section selection. You can Ctrl+Click on a tab, and this tab will be added to the current selection instead of replacing it. Notes from this tab will be added to the notes list.

What is necessary to remember here is that the first section that was selected is the “main” section that defines the view state (the sorting order and search parameters).

The Ctrl+Shift+Space shortcut, or the “Select All” command in the section’s context menu, allows you to quickly select all sections. This can be useful when you don’t exactly remember the needed section and want to search your whole notebook, for example.

The Inbox section

An important question is the following: which section do notes created with system-wide hotkeys, such as the clipping hotkey, or new note hotkey, go to?

By default, such notes go to the currently active section. If multiple sections are active, then they go to the section which was selected first (the “host” section).

However, this requires you to always remember which section is currently active, even when CintaNotes may have been minimized to the tray hours ago — sometimes this may be less than ideal. It may be more convenient to have a designated “inbox” section to accommodate such notes. And in CintaNotes you can do just that: mark one of the sections as an Inbox section.

A section can be marked as Inbox with the “Set as Inbox” context menu command, or simply via middle-clicking on the section’s tab. Also the active section can be set as Inbox by pressing Ctrl+I. The Inbox section tab has a special icon.

When there exists a section marked as Inbox, new notes created from the system-wide hotkeys go to the Inbox section even when it is not active.

Please observe that this applies only to notes created with system-wide hotkeys! The rules are different for notes created via the Edit/New command (or via pressing the Ins or Ctrl+N key in the main window). In this case, CintaNotes assumes that since you’re currently looking at the notes list and working with a specific section, you’d also want new notes to be created in the currently active section, regardless of which section is marked as the Inbox (if any).

(For the sake of completeness, there is one case when the Inbox status is used outside of the system-wide context: if multiple sections are active, and the Inbox section is among them, the notes will go to the Inbox section and not to the “host” section.)

Sections and Tags

Tags are global and shared between all sections. So don’t be surprised if you see a lot of tags with a use count of zero when you create a new section.

There’s an easy way to reduce the clutter here. By activating the “Used Only” tag filter mode in the Tag Sidebar’s context menu you’ll only see the tags which are present in the currently selected sections (that is, only tags assigned to notes from selected sections will be displayed).

About Rules

Organization is the key to efficient information management. However, organizing notes manually can take a lot of time and effort. This is why CintaNotes has rules, which can automatically tag your notes or even move them between sections based on user-defined conditions. Rules are notebook-specific, i.e. each notebook has its own set of rules. Each rule is of the form “IF [conditions] THEN [actions]”, where you get to specify both conditions and actions, and CintaNotes will evaluate conditions and execute actions each time any note is modified.

Creating Rules

To create a rule, go to the “File/Rules” menu. Then click on the plus icon at the top right corner to bring up the “Edit Rule” dialog (alternatively, you can right-click on the blank space and select “Add” from the context menu).

You can give a name to your rule, but this is not required: CintaNotes will set the rule name automatically based on rule actions in the “THEN” section.

To create a condition for your rule, choose the options you need from the drop-down menus in the “IF” section.

Let’s have a look at the options available. “Any text field”, “Title”, “Text”, “Link”, and “Remarks” trigger the rule if the condition is fulfilled within these fields.

The “Tags” option triggers the rule if the condition is fulfilled within the tags field:

The “Attachments” option triggers the rule if the condition is fulfilled for the attachment(s) of a note:

The “Section” option triggers the rule if the condition is fulfilled for one of the sections in the current notebook:

The “Created” option triggers the rule for the notes with a certain creation date:

The “Modified” option triggers the rule for the notes with a certain modification date:

The “Note” option triggers the rule for either new or not new notes:

You can select more than one condition for your rule. For this, simply click on the plus icon below the drop-down menus and select the options you need.

Many operators also support wildcards. This includes “contains”, “contains all”, “item contains”, “starts with”, “ends with”, “equals” operators, and all their negative counterparts. Once you select one of these operators, a “Use * and ? wildcards” checkbox will appear. If you activate this checkbox, the “?” and “*” symbols in the specified value will be treated as wildcards.

Note that not all rule conditions are equally fast. For example, the “contains” condition is much slower than the “starts with” or “ends with” conditions. Conditions with “any text field” are slower than conditions for specific fields. The “any text field – contains” or “text – contains” conditions are the slowest. It’s best to avoid slow conditions whenever possible. If such conditions can’t be avoided, it is best to put them as the very last ones. This way they will be evaluated only after other conditions have reduced the number of analyzed notes.

Sometimes CintaNotes provides you with one more drop-down menu or text field on the right, where you need to specify some data for the rule to work. Some conditions allow you to specify more than one value. Additional values can be added with a ‘+’ icon, and the logical connection between them (‘and’ or ‘or’) depends on the selected condition.

To choose what should happen when the condition is fulfilled, select one of the options from the drop-down menu in the “THEN” section.

Let’s have a look at these options:

“Add tag(s)” and “Remove tag(s)” actions will require you to enter the tags in the field on the right.

The “Move to Section” and “Copy to Section” actions come with a drop-down menu of existing sections.

You can also specify more than one action to be executed. For this, simply repeat the above procedure.

Testing Rules

After you’re happy with your choices, it’s a good idea to test the rule. Getting the rule to behave exactly like you want can be tricky; this is why every rule should be tested first.
Testing allows you to see how many times the rule would be executed if you applied it to your existing notes. To do this, click on the “Test Rule”button at the lower-left corner and wait for the report.

If the test results agree with your expectations, click “OK” to save the rule and return to the rules list.

It will appear in the “File/Rules” menu, where you can find all rules of the current notebook.

For information about undoing rule actions, please see the Rules Log section below

Applying Rules

It’s important to understand exactly when the rules are applied to the notes. After you have created or modified a rule, upon closing the Rules dialog CintaNotes will prompt you to apply changed rules immediately to existing notes.

CintaNotes will display a window with the progress bar:

After that, rules work in background mode: each time any note changes in any way, all active rules are re-evaluated, and matching rules are applied. For new notes, rules are applied upon first save.

Inactive Rules

Sometimes you don’t want a rule to be active, but want to still have it around. To choose whether or not a rule should be evaluated and executed, use the “Active” checkbox.

This can also be done via right-clicking on any rule in the File/Rule menu and ticking/unticking “Active” in the context menu.

Rules Log

When rules are not behaving exactly like you want them to, it’s helpful to see the full log of rule executions. CintaNotes has such a log where you can review all rule applications and even undo them. To see it, click on the “View Log” button at the lower-left corner of the Rules dialog.

Here you can undo the changes by selecting them and clicking on the “Undo” button below. (Or you can right-click on any rule and select “Undo” from the context menu).

Editing Rules

To edit existing rules, go to the File / Rules menu, find the rule you want to change, and double-click on it (or right-click on any rule in the list and choose “Edit” from the context menu).

This will open the “Edit Rule” menu, where you can add new or remove existing conditions and results (see above).

To delete conditions or results you no longer need, click on the cross icon right next to their drop-down menus.

Deleting Rules

To delete a rule, go the File/Rules menu, select the rule you want to get rid of, and hit “Delete” on the keyboard (or click on the red cross icon on the right panel). You can also right-click on the rule and choose “Delete” from the context menu.

If you work on multiple PCs, e.g. at home and at work, or want to have your notes always at hand on your mobile device, you will probably want your notes to be automatically synchronized. CintaNotes supports two kinds of synchronization: via the Simplenote service and via DropBox.

Simplenote Synchronization

Simplenote is an online service for notes which allows any application to share and synchronize notes over the cloud. It is the preferred way to synchronize, since it makes your notes available in a large variety of Simplenote-enabled note-taking applications on multiple platforms, which include Mac, Linux, Android and iOS.

Here are the steps needed to configure CintaNotes for Simplenote synchronization:

1. If you don’t already have a Simplenote account, go to the Simplenote
   website and click on “Create an account”.
2. After you have your Simplenote account ready, run CintaNotes and choose the File / Synchronization command.
   
3. In the dialog that pops up, check the Synchronize this notebook with Simplenote checkbox.
4. Enter your Simplenote login and password into the corresponding fields.
5. You can synchronize all sections, or pick which sections should be synchronized. CintaNotes sections are mapped onto Simplenote tags: section “MyNotes” will become a “#section/MyNotes” tag in Simplenote.
6. The Conflict Resolution Policy field lets you configure what CintaNotes should do in a situation when a note has been modified both in CintaNotes and in Simplenote. The default behavior is to keep the version which has been modified last.
7. If you’d like to have CintaNotes synchronize notes automatically in the background, check the Synchronize automatically every N minutes checkbox and select the convenient synchronization period.
8. Click OK.

Now when any of the synchronized sections is displayed, a synchronization bar will be displayed on the bottom of the notes list. This bar will display the synchronization progress, and it also allows starting synchronization manually by clicking on the ‘Refresh’ icon with two curved arrows in the shape of a circle.

The synchronization can also be started manually at any time via pressing the F12 key.

Now you can access and edit your notes online at the Simplenote website:

Synchronize CintaNotes Notebooks with Your Mobile Devices

If you want to access your notes with your mobile devices, follow these steps:

1. Start by establishing synchronization between the Simplenote service and CintaNotes on your PC.
2. Install your preferred Simplenote supported app from the list and install it on your mobile device.
3. Synchronize notes between Simplenote, your PC, and your mobile device.

For demonstration purposes we’ll use the official Simplenote app for Android, which you can get on Google Play. After installing, the app starts with the following welcome screen:

If you’ve already created a Simplenote account and have synchronized your notes from your PC to the Simplenote server, just sign in with your login and password now. If you still don’t have a Simplenote account, you can create one by clicking on the Sign up button on the welcome screen and following the steps as described.

After signing in, Simplenote will immediately start synchronizing the notes on your mobile device with the notes on the Simplenote server. Your tags are visible in the tag field. You can create new notes by pressing the blue icon in the lower left corner:

You can activate the scrollable tag list by tapping on the menu icon on the toolbar:

From here you also have access to the app settings.

Working with Several Notebooks on Your Mobile Device

Unfortunately you can synchronize only one CintaNotes notebook per Simplenote account. If you need to synchronize several notebooks, create additional Simplenote accounts with different email addresses on the Simplenote server, synchronize them with your CintaNotes notebooks (one email address per notebook), sign out of your Simplenote account in the app settings on your mobile device, and sign in with the account you want to work with. Your notes will be immediately synchronized.

Dropbox Synchronization

Though Simplenote synchronization is only for PRO users, Dropbox synchronization is available for all users, even in the free version of CintaNotes! Its advantage over Simplenote synchronization is that no data transformations take place, so on all Dropbox-connected instances of your CintaNotes you’ll get exactly the same database. Also, Dropbox allows synchronizing the whole notebook and not just one section of it.

The downside of this kind of synchronization is that as CintaNotes is a Windows-only program, it can sync only to other Windows PCs, and you won’t have access to your notes online or on other platforms.

The recommended way to setup Dropbox synchronization is as follows:

1. Go to the Dropbox website and install the Dropbox client. A synchronized
   folder called “My Dropbox” will be created.
2. Make sure that the CintaNotes program and settings files are outside of this Dropbox folder (e.g. in
   “C:\CintaNotes”).
3. Run CintaNotes
4. Save a copy of your notebook inside of the “My DropBox” folder using the File / Save As… menu
   command.

On any other PC with the Dropbox client installed and connected to your Dropbox account, run CintaNotes and open the synchronized notebook file in its “My Dropbox” folder using the File / Open… command. That’s it! Now your notes will be automatically synchronized. Configuring for other synchronization services like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or SugarSync is similar.

Moving the CintaNotes program and its settings files into the Dropbox folder is NOT recommended because:

• The backup files will constantly be “conflicted”;
• You won’t be able to have separate settings on different PCs.

You don’t have to close CintaNotes for your notes to be synchronized. After 30 seconds of inactivity, CintaNotes releases the notebook file lock. But please allow some time (usually about 2-10 minutes, depending on your internet connection) for a full synchronization cycle.

Please understand that if you take notes while offline, or shut down the computer right after you’ve created some notes, these last notes may not be synchronized, and if you then take notes on another PC, conflicts might arise. With DropBox, you will notice them with the appearance of the “conflicted copy” notebook files alongside your notebook file. If you see these files, you will need to merge them back into your main notebook file.

To do that use the File / Import… command on this conflicted file. The import command filters out duplicate notes automatically, so that you will only get the notes that you don’t have. This handles the most frequent case of added notes, but in case of modified or deleted notes you may still have to delete unnecessary notes by hand.

This feature is only available to the PRO license holders.

Since version 2.9, CintaNotes can protect your sensitive data and encrypt notebooks using the industry acclaimed AES-256 algorithm. The notebook will always remain encrypted on disk and will only be decrypted into memory when you enter the password.

Currently the password protection feature works with whole notebooks only. It is not possible to encrypt only some notes in a notebook.

Setting the Password

To set the password for the current notebook, select the File / Password Protection command in the main menu. The following window will appear:

Activate the Protect this notebook with a password checkbox and enter the desired password into the New password and Confirm password fields (you need to enter the password twice to minimize the risk of a typo).

The controls below this allow you to configure password options, and we’ll examine them in a later section.

Press OK and CintaNotes will report progress as it is encrypting the notebook.

After the password is set, any access to the notebook when it is locked (more on this in a later section) will require entering the password like this:

Note that instead of entering the password, you can press Cancel to minimize CintaNotes back to the tray (in case you activated it by mistake, for example). You can also click on the Notebook… button to open another notebook.

Password Options

Now let’s take a look at which options are available for password-protected notebooks.

The radio buttons Don’t remember the password and Remember the password allow you to choose between maximum security and convenience.

By default CintaNotes will only keep the password in RAM and won’t store it on disk. This means that the password is unrecoverable – if you forget the password, you lose access to your notes.

This mode is the most secure option and should be preferred for the most sensitive data. However, it can be somewhat inconvenient at times, because all background operations like cloud syncing and backup will not run until the password is entered and the notebook is unlocked – at least once after the application is started.

If convenience is more important to you than security, though, you can choose the option to remember the password. In this case CintaNotes will store the encrypted password hash on disk and will be able to run all background services even before you enter the password for the first time.

If you have portable CintaNotes in a Dropbox (or other cloud-synced) folder, always use the “Don’t remember password option”, otherwise your password could be cracked remotely!

On the positive side, when the option to remember the password is active, it is possible to reset a forgotten password and reclaim access to your notes with the help of CintaNotes tech support.

The Lock and minimize to tray after X minutes of inactivity controls the timeout after which you’ll need to re-enter the password. When this option is active, CintaNotes tracks user activity; after the specified period of the user not being active in the program, it will automatically minimize itself to the tray and lock the notebook.

The Lock immediately after minimizing to tray option allows you to manually lock the notebook simply by minimizing the application to the tray.

Please be aware that the notebook is automatically locked when the workstation is locked, so to lock the notebook you can also press Win+L.

Changing the Password

To change the password after it has been set, go to the same File / Password Protection window and click on the “Change Password” button.

The panel with the “New password” and “Confirm password” edit fields will appear. Enter the new password into them, then click on OK and re-enter the old password. After that the notebook will be re-encrypted with the new password.

Removing the Password

To remove the password and decrypt the current notebook, simply uncheck the “Protect this notebook with a password” checkbox in the “Password Protection” window. After clicking OK and entering the password for the last time, the notebook will be decrypted.

Pasting notes to other applications is a commercial feature available only to PRO license
holders.

CintaNotes allows you to extract the content of a note to another application running on your Windows PC. Pressing Ctrl+Enter or the middle mouse button will paste the currently selected note (or notes) into the Windows application that was running immediately prior to opening CintaNotes.

This feature is a great time-saver when writing a report, for example. You can be writing in Word, then switch to CintaNotes, select a note which you want to quote, hit Ctrl+Enter, and the note appears in your Word document, ready for you to continue writing.

Pressing Ctrl+Shift+Enter (or Shift+Middle click) inserts all note fields and not only note text.

The most ergonomic way of using this feature is combining it with the Show/Hide Window hotkey configured in Options / Hotkeys…..

Sometimes creating text-only notes is not enough and you need to attach some files to make your notes more informative. To add a file to your note, open the note in the editor and click the paper clip button at the top-right corner to browse for files (or press F12).

Pick the necessary file and click Open to add it to your note. Selecting and attaching multiple files at once is also supported.

An alternative way to attach files is to drag-and-drop them onto the note editor. A confirmation dialog box will pop up:

You can tick Don’t ask again to prevent this confirmation request from opening in the future.

All attachments are stored in the database in compressed form. The maximum size of a single attached file should not exceed 2 GB.

Viewing and Editing Attachments

To view or edit an attached file, you need to open the note it belongs to, and double click the necessary attachment (or select it and press Enter). The same can be done by right-clicking on the file and choosing Open from the pop-up menu.

This will open the file in the default application for this file type, where you can view and edit it.
If you need to open the file with another application, right click on the file and choose the Open With… command from the context menu of the file.

It is important to understand that since attachments are stored in the notebook file, CintaNotes needs to extract them to the disk before opening them in external applications. So when you access an attached file for viewing or editing, CintaNotes temporarily saves it to the Temp folder (normally the default path will be C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Temp), from which it is then opened.

If you open an attached file from a password protected notebook, CintaNotes will warn you that the document is about to be saved to an unencrypted temporary file. This will make it accessible to other users you may share your PC with. CintaNotes automatically deletes extracted attachments after you finish viewing or editing them in the external application(s). However, if you exit CN before closing the external viewer, the temporary file may be left behind. CintaNotes will warn you about this one more time before closing.

If you modify the extracted attachment file after opening it, CintaNotes will detect this and will prompt to update the attachment by displaying the following message box:

If you select Yes, the updated version of the file will be copied from the disk into the notebook file.

Managing Attachments

To remove an attachment from a note, right-click on the file and choose Delete from the context menu (or simply hit Del on the keyboard).

You can select and delete multiple attachments at once.

To remove all attachments, ‘focus’ the attachment list (by clicking on it) and press Ctrl+A, then press Delete.

Files will appear in the attachment list in the order you add them. Currently the only way to change this order is to remove the attachments and re-add them in the correct order.

Finding Attachments

If you create multiple notes with attachments, soon it will become difficult to quickly find notes containing the files that you need. CintaNotes provides a special search mode to solve this problem.

Click on the magnifying glass icon next to the search bar and select Attachments to limit your search to the attached file names.

Now start typing the name of the file you need to find, and CintaNotes will display notes having this file in the attachments (note that CintaNotes can only search in the names of the files, not in their contents).

Synchronizing Attachments

If you add attachments to notes which are being synchronized with Simplenote, CintaNotes will automatically synchronize the attached files (for more details see Synchronizing Notes).

However, since Simplenote does not support file attachments, these files will be synchronized using Cinta Software’s own server. They will be encrypted with your Simplenote password, and only another CintaNotes instance with a correct Simplenote password will be able to decrypt them.

Currently the total size of the synchronized attachments is limited to 100 Mb per one Simplenote account. CintaNotes will display a warning message in the Simplenote Synchronization Properties window if the total size of syncronized attachments exceeds this number. To continue syncing, you’ll need to delete some of your attachments, or move some to a non-synchronizing section or notebook. (Please be aware that attachments belonging to notes located in the Recycle Bin may still be using some of your allocated space on the server.)

Importing and Exporting Attachments

CintaNotes supports importing and exporting attachments to and from XML in Base64-encoded form. Upon export there’s an option “Attachments” which controls whether the attachments will be added to the XML file.

Note that exporting to the HTML and TXT formats will not include any of your attachments.

You can insert links to web pages, other notes, and local files into your notes using the Insert Link context menu command in the note editor (or corresponding keyboard shortcuts).

Links to Web Pages

To insert a link to a web page or any other network resource into a note, open the note in the editor and use the Insert Link / URL context menu command (or press Alt+Shift+U).

This will bring up a dialog box where you can enter the URL of the link target.

Links to Local Files

CintaNotes also supports links to files on your computer. To insert such a link, choose the Insert Link / File context menu command (or press Alt+Shift+F) to browse for files.

Locate the file and click the Open button to add the link to the note.

When no text is selected, CintaNotes will use the file name as the link text. Otherwise, the selected text will become the link’s caption. Activating the link will open the file in the default application for this file type.

If the file is located on an NTFS disk volume, the link will stay valid even when you move the file to a different folder. CintaNotes automatically tracks the file location and updates the link accordingly. However, this automatic tracking works only while the file remains on the same disk volume.

Links to Other Notes

Inserting links to other notes is a commercial feature available only to PRO license holders.

Links to other notes can be added with the Insert Link / Note command in the context menu (or by pressing Alt+Shift+N). A search box will pop up, where you can type the target’s note title or some title keywords. Having found the needed note, press Enter and the note link will be added. Here you also have the option of creating a new note as the link target.

When no text is selected, CintaNotes will use the note title as the link text. Otherwise, the selected text will become the link’s caption.

An alternative way to create a note link is by using the Copy Link to Note context menu command in the notes list. To use it, choose the command from the context menu of the note in the notes list and then paste the link from the clipboard into the needed note (Ctrl+V). Also, when you copy a note to the clipboard from the notes list, you can force pasting a link to it with the Paste Note Link command.

Retargeting Links

Any link caption can be freely edited and it won’t affect the link target. The link target can be changed anytime manually by selecting the link and choosing the Retarget Link context menu command. A dialog box will pop up where you will be able to edit the link’s target.

In most cases the link caption is updated automatically when the link target is modified. However, for links to web pages there’s one notable exception: if the link’s caption is different from the URL, the caption is not updated. This is useful for links embedded directly into the text flow.

Removing Links

If you want to completely remove a link, simply delete it with the usual text editing tools. To remove a link while leaving its caption in place, select it and use the Delete Link context menu command (Alt+Shift+D). The link will turn into plain text.

In case the link’s caption happens to be a valid URL itself, the caption will be removed as well.

Linking to Notes in Other Notebooks

Note Links can be used with multiple notebooks as well. For a link to a different notebook to work, however, the notebook needs to be open; that is, it should be present in the notebook list of the File menu. Otherwise CintaNotes will have no way of knowing where to find the target notebook, and the link won’t work.

Global Note Links

CintaNotes also supports global note links: links to CintaNotes notes which can be inserted into and activated from other programs. This feature can be used to integrate CintaNotes with other information management software.

For these links to work, you need to register a CintaNotes instance with the system as the handler of the “cintanotes://” link protocol. Since this requires registry modification, you need to run CintaNotes as administrator and activate the Options / System / Register Link Protocol option.

To create a global note link, copy a link to a note with the Copy Note Link command (Alt+Shift+C) and paste this link into any application that supports links, such as Outlook, Word, or any rich-text-enabled information manager. You can also use this link with web applications.

When the “cintanotes://” link protocol is registered with the system, clicking on a global note link will activate CintaNotes and open directly to the target note. Please note that if there are multiple CintaNotes installations on the system, then the note’s notebook should be open in the CintaNotes instance that has registered itself as the “cintanotes://” link handler — otherwise, the target note won’t be found and the link won’t work.

CintaNotes supports note exporting in several ways:

1. Unicode text file. You can export notes from your notebook to a Unicode text file via the File / Export command. This is a one-way export: you cannot import this text file back into CintaNotes.
2. XML Exporting. A more generic approach is to use the XML format for further note processing Choose the File / Export main menu command, select “XML” from the available formats, and enter the name of the XML file all notes will be exported into. This file can be viewed and processed with your favorite XML authoring program. CintaNotes can load this XML file back into itself with the File/Import command.
3. HTML Exporting. You can also export notes from your notebook to an HTML file, which can then be easily viewed in your favorite browser. Choose the File / Export main menu command, select “HTML” from the available formats, and enter the name of the HTML file all notes will be exported into. This is a one-way export: you cannot import the HTML file back into CintaNotes.

   Note that HTML export is only available to PRO License holders.

4. Exporting as text via clipboard. Select notes, copy them to the clipboard, and paste them as text into
   any text processing application such as Windows’ standard Notepad.

If you want to retain all information and be able to import notes back into CintaNotes, choose the XML format.

The “Export Scope” groupbox gives you a choice whether to export all notes, the currently visible, or only the selected ones. The “Export Fields” list lets you choose which fields should be exported (by default all fields are exported).

You can import notes using the File/Import command, either from previously exported XML files or from other notebook (.db) files.

CintaNotes automatically creates two backup files: .daily.db is updated every day, and .weekly.db is updated once per week. An hourly backup can also be activated in the File / Backup menu.

By default the files are written into the backup folder, which is located either in the main application folder (for portable installations), or in %APPDATA%\CintaNotes (when CintaNotes is installed into the Program Files folder). The backup folder path can be modified by editing the cintanotes.settings file (see the Advanced Configuration section for details).

To restore your notes from backup, use the File / Import command and pick the necessary backup file.

Backup Options

The options in the File / Backup menu control which of the three backup files should be created and kept up-to-date. If you uncheck any of these options, the existing backup file will be retained, but it will not be updated anymore.

By default only daily and weekly backups are enabled, but you can change this setting using the File / Backup submenu. The files are written into the “backup” subfolder of the CintaNotes application data folder, but this path can be modified using the cintanotes.settings file.

Visual Parameters

The Color Theme submenu of the View menu lets you select the most pleasant color for your notes. This can also be useful to quickly tell apart different instances of CintaNotes.

The Notes List command of the Options menu opens a window where you can pick fonts for your notes’ headers and text, and adjust how many note lines should be displayed directly in the list. You may also select if Rich Text formatting should be rendered in the note preview.

Hot Keys

The Hot Keys command from the Options menu enables you to change the default system-wide key combinations for clipping text, activating the CintaNotes window, and adding a new note.

Clipping Options

If Options / Clipping / Silent is activated, CintaNotes will not pop up after each clipping, but will display a balloon tip instead. Clicking on the balloon opens CintaNotes.

The Options / Clipping / Use as Title menu lets you control where the clipped note’s title is taken from.

Options / Clipping / After Clipping / Switch View to Untagged specifies whether you want to switch the tag filter to show only untagged notes after clipping, which is convenient for separating newly taken notes from the rest, and for tagging them.

Options / Clipping / After Clipping / Open in Editor lets you open a newly clipped note in the editor for immediate tagging and any desired editing.

Options / Clipping / After Clipping / Assign currently active tags – When this option is on, newly clipped notes are automatically assigned all of the tags which are currently selected on the Tag Sidebar.

Search Options

The Search submenu of the Options menu contains options related to searching notes.

The Options/Search/Multi-Step Reset on Esc option controls whether filter resets happen sequentially or at once. When enabled, the text filter is reset on the first ESC press, while the tags filter is reset on the second press.

When the Options/Search/Reset Search on Ctrl+F option is active, pressing Ctrl+F will clear all active text and tag filters.

Editor Options

The Options / Editor submenu lets you tweak the note editor behavior.

By default, the editor focuses the note’s title field. If you’d like to always start with entering a note’s text, you can use the Options / Editor / Initial Focus / Text option.

The Notes Editor can automatically highlight various links in the notes text. The Options / Editor / Highlight Links option controls this behavior. In this submenu you can also specify whether you’d like to use single or double mouse clicks to open these links.

Tag Options

Uncheck Options/Tags/Lower case only if you want to use capital letters in tags.

The Display Tag Usage Counts on Sidebar option is pretty self-explanatory; it controls the display of the tag usage counters to the right of the tag names.

The “Accept Suggestions On” submenu enables you to fine-tune the tag autocompletion behavior.

The Context-Sensitive Suggestions option controls which tags are suggested for the tag autocomplete function. When activated, only tags already used in currently active sections, or in the section the edited note belongs to, are suggested. Even when this option is active, you can force suggestion of tags from all sections by pressing Ctrl+Space.

Main Window Behavior Options

If you want CintaNotes to be minimized to the system notification area (otherwise known as the “System Tray”), turn on the Minimize to System Tray option in the Options menu.

Turn on the Close to System Tray option if you want the program to behave the same way when you close the window (that is, when you click on the window’s Close button or press Alt+F4). When this option is turned on, closing the window will not exit the program. To exit CintaNotes, you will have to select the “File/Exit” command, or right-click on the CintaNotes icon in the notification area and select Exit.

If you want the CintaNotes window to always be on top of other windows, turn on the Always on Top option.

The “Minimize on Esc” option allows you to disable the default behavior where CintaNotes minimizes itself when there’s no search filter to clear and you press Esc.

The “Minimize on Losing Focus” option allows to automatically have CintaNotes minimized after a certain period of inactivity. The timeout value can be selected in the submenu.

Startup Options

Options / Startup / Run Minimized makes CintaNotes always start minimized to tray.

Check Options / Startup / Run at system startup to have CintaNotes start automatically at Windows startup. It will start minimized to the System Tray regardless of the Run Minimized option.

Use this option with care if you run CintaNotes from a USB stick, since if the stick is absent CintaNotes won’t be found during system startup.

Options / Startup / Allow multiple instances specifies whether CintaNotes will run if another instance is already running. When this option is off, CintaNotes will display a message box informing you that an instance has already been activated.

For advanced users: This message box can be turned off by editing the startup.multipleinstances.activationmsg parameter in the cintanotes.settings file.

Selecting Language

CintaNotes has a multilingual user interface – by default the user interface will be in English. You can switch the current language with the Options / Language menu.

If you cannot find your language in the list, please check the official translation center first, as someone might have already translated CintaNotes into your language and the translation is scheduled to be included in the next release. If your language is absent or incomplete, you might opt to do a great favor to all speakers of your language and create a translation yourself. You’ll have to register on the site and enroll into the translation team for your language.

Advanced Configuration

Some options of CintaNotes can only be set by editing the cintanotes.settings file, which by default is stored under %APPDATA%\CintaNotes. Be sure to edit it using a Unicode-aware text editor (e.g. Notepad).

app.mainframe.basecolor

Encoded base color of the current color theme, as a web color value like #F05A00. A dark color should be used as the base color. You can think of it as a hue reference value; all colors of the theme are derived from it by blending it with white in different proportions.

app.mainframe.minimizeonescape.immediate

Controls the program’s behavior on ESC press. When active, filters are reset and the program window is minimized, all on the first ESC press. When this parameter is 0, filters are reset first, and the main window is minimized only when no filters are active at the time ESC is pressed. Note that this parameter is ignored if filters.reset.onescape.enabled = 0. Default value: 0 (false).

app.mainframe.tagsidebar.doubleclick.onlyrelated

Specifies whether a double-click on a tag should turn on the “Display Only Related Tags” mode. Default value: 0 (disabled).

backup.folder

The folder where CintaNotes writes backup files to (“backup” by default). Both relative (e.g. “..\..\backup”) and absolute (e.g. “F:\backups\cn”) paths are supported.

clipping.trimwhitespace

Specifies whether CintaNotes should trim leading and trailing whitespace from the clipped text. Trimming is enabled by default.

clipping.waittime.seconds

Specifies how long CintaNotes should wait for the data to appear in the clipboard.

confirm.action

Specifies whether CintaNotes should ask for a confirmation of the action. Set to 1 to re-enable confirmations which were previously disabled with the “Don’t ask again” checkmark.

editor.colors.highlight

Color used for highlighted text style. Yellow by default.

editor.focus.title

Specifies whether the Title field of the note editor is focused initially. When this option is 0 (off), the note text field gets focused. Default value: 0 (off).

editor.fonts.monospace

Font face used for the monospace text style. “Courier New” is the default.

editor.trimlines

When enabled, all trailing whitespace on each line gets automatically removed when a note is saved. This incurs a slight performance hit, so this option is disabled by default.

filters.reset.onescape.enabled

Enables resetting text and tag filters on ESC key press. Default value: 1 (enabled).

noteslist.search.highlights.displaycounts

Enables or disables display of search matches’ counts in the note preview area. Default: 1 (on).

sqlite.pragma.cache_size

Controls how many database pages can be kept in memory and directly influences how much memory the program will consume. Each page is 4096 bytes. The larger this value, the faster CintaNotes will work with large databases, but also the more PC memory will be consumed.

sqlite.pragma.synchronous

Three possible values: FULL, NORMAL and OFF. Default value is NORMAL. If you experience frequent DB corruption (might be relevant for unstable systems and hot-unplugged USB drives), try setting this setting to FULL. CintaNotes will run slower, waiting after each modification till the data is written to disk before returning control to the user.

startup.multipleinstances.activationmsg

Specifies whether CintaNotes will display a message box indicating that there is an already-running instance. Default value: 1 (on).

Command-Line Switches

-c, –close

Close all running copies of CintaNotes and exit. This parameter is intended to be used from batch scripts, when you need to be sure that CintaNotes is not running.

-d, –debug

Enable extended debug logging. A file named “log.N.txt” will be created, where N is a sequentially incrementing number. Since this makes the program run much more slowly, it is not recommended to use this feature unless asked to do so by the program’s technical support.

-i, –invisible

Run in ‘invisible’ mode. Other instances of CintaNotes won’t find this instance. It is a non-persistent alternative of the Options/Startup/Allow Multiple Instances option.

-m, –minimized

Start minimized to tray. It is a non-persistent alternative of the Options/Startup/Run Minimized option.

–noactivationmsg

Suppress the message box which appears when you start CintaNotes with CintaNotes already running. This is a non-persistent alternative of the “startup.multipleinstances.activationmsg” option in the settings file.

Installed Version

In the Start Menu, go to “All Programs / CintaNotes” and then select “Uninstall CintaNotes”. After that, a UAC prompt may appear which you should authorize to make changes to the computer, then click “Yes” to uninstall. The uninstall process is automatic and removes all program files. However, it will leave the user’s notebook file(s) intact, as well as any existing weekly / daily / hourly backup files.

Portable Version

There’s no automatic uninstall in the portable version. Just delete the CintaNotes folder and any shortcuts which you might have created.

See a list of all keyboard shortcuts supported by CintaNotes on this page.