How to Install Scribes (awesome Text Writer!) in Ubuntu?

I've used reasonable amount of text editors under GNU/Linux and I gotta tell you, there are few that were quite unique and made some impressive impressions on me :) which you don't see that often.

In that sense, Scribes not is only an awesome text editor but it also has a very unique GUI + a notification system that's quite a pleasure to work with. As said, this is not the "usual" text editor's behavior that you get from the "others" :).

It has no menus whatsoever, so the main window looks pretty clean and hassle free which really helps when it comes to typing stuff. As you can see in the below screenshot, if you want to make it's tool-bar visible, then you just gotta move your mouse hover over the right-edge of the Scribes window (the "Red" area, also known as the "trigger area"), then it'll reveal the tool-bar which I think is pretty cool :D.

And whenever, say while saving your text automatically or doing changes, it'll display then as notifications which are shown in the bottom section of the window too.

With the tool-bar "on", btw, you can also change the location of this "trigger area" as well..

Although this will depend on the personal taste, but usually a lot of people just hate "notifications" (at least I am) because they're almost always so distracting and pain in the a*$. But in my experience, while using Scribes, not only those notifications are useful (since they give you live info on what's going on, etc) but the developer have done an excellent job of making sure that they don't distract you!.

Main features...

*. Change text font and size, bold/italic, etc.

*. Enable/disable spell checking.

*. Jump to paragraphs.

*. Supports a huge list of file types (such as XML, HTML, Java, C#, C/C++, etc). All you gotta do is just load the appropriate "template", this heavily helps it to "understand" the file thus letting you edit it without breaking any codes (obviously). So it's kinda of a programmer's tool too.

*. Change themes.

*. Search, search and replace. 

*. Built in printing support.

*. Undo/Redo.

*. Plug-in support (by using plug-ins/add-ons, you can easily expand its features. For instance, I heard that there's a separate plug-in that adds a side-bar, etc).

*. Simple yet totally non-distractive notifications.

*. Indentation... are just a few to mention.

But remember, Scribes is actually designed to act as a hassle free text writing app (excellent one!) rather than an editor. For instance, if you usually want to make text bold/italic or change its font, yes, you can do that. But since it doesn't have a menu or those functions are not in the tool-bar, I think you this will not be the most efficiency one for that sort an activity.

So will this be able to replace the "usual" text editors such as Leafpad, Mousepad, etc. The simple answer in my opinion is: NO!. It won't because that's not its purpose. 

Anyhow, you can install Scribes in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by using its PPA rather than the Ubuntu repositories which are according to the developer, are "old and broken". So put the below commands in your Terminal window to install it, as usual.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mystilleef/scribes-daily

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install scribes

So, if you want a minimalistic text writer rather than an editor with as little distractions as possible, (still retaining a beautifully designed, efficient GUI of course) ... then Scribes is one heck of an app!. Enjoy.