Ferrous Software · Cupertino & Ann Arbor

Plinth 2.1

A small, stubborn place to keep the things you think. Plinth stores notes as plain slips, indexes every word, and never asks you to name a folder before you are ready.

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What is new in 2.1

• Instant Find. Typing in the Find bar now filters the slip list on every keystroke instead of waiting for Return.
• Linked slips. Wrap any phrase in double brackets and Plinth builds the connection, backwards and forwards.
• Sturdier autosave. Every 45 seconds, plus on window deactivation. We tested it by pulling the plug 400 times.
• Printing that behaves. Margins are honoured. Widow lines are not.

Installing

1. Drag the Plinth 2.1 folder onto your hard disk. Do not run it from the floppy — it will work, and it will be miserable.
2. Open the Plinth Control panel and choose where your slips should live.
3. Restart. Plinth installs one extension, PlinthIndex, weighing 31 K.

“It is the only note program I have used that does not try to become a life philosophy. It opens, it holds the sentence, it closes.”

— The Quarterly Disk, issue 39

Requirements

Any machine with 4 MB of memory and a hard disk. Plinth is happiest with 8 MB and a colour monitor, but it was written on a beige box under a window and it remembers where it came from.

Known quirks

• Slips longer than 30,000 characters cannot be printed in one pass. Split them; your reader will thank you.
• The Find bar ignores punctuation entirely. This is deliberate and we will not be moved.
• If the index file is deleted, Plinth rebuilds it on next launch — about nine seconds per thousand slips.

A note on the interface

We drew every control at actual size on graph paper first. If a line looks like it is one pixel thick, it is one pixel thick. Nothing here is soft, nothing glows, and nothing moves unless you moved it. Windows drag as an outline because redrawing the whole thing sixty times a second was a luxury nobody had, and because you can see what is underneath while you decide.

Thank you for reading all the way down. The scroll bar on the right is real — the arrows, the track, and the thumb all work, and none of them are the browser's.

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Plinth 2.1 · © 1993 Ferrous Software · Serial FS-2100-88417 · Not licensed for use aboard aircraft.