Using an External Editor (Note: this feature is likely no longer available in later versions of the Android OS)

To use an external editor instead of Pimlical's built-in editor, change the preference MemoUseExternalEditor in the Memos section of preferences to true. If you have more than one editor that can handle plain text files, Android will display a list of all such editors so you can pick which one you want to use. There is also typically an option to make your selection the future default.

When creating a new memo, or editing/displaying an existing memo, Pimlical will then invoke that external editor instead of using its built-in editor.

When you close out the file/exit from that editing program, you return to Pimlical. However, depending on the editor that you use, Pimlical may not necessarily refresh the Memo Selection List to show the changes that were just made, or to display a newly created memo. In that case, you can refresh the list either by pressing the back button and using Menu | View/Edit Memos again, or by tapping the Find button and tapping OK. In order for Pimlical to display the updated memo list, the external editor must properly respond to the command that invoked it (not all external editing programs necessarily follow the Android standards for this).

You can also use the Back button to return to Pimlical, however, in most cases this will also leave that editing program still in memory with the memo open (this depends on how the editing program works). This may or may not be an issue - but it is important to understand that the editor may not necessarily exit, even though it is no longer being displayed.

Use caution with any delete file command in that external editor. If you delete a memo using an external editor, the fact that you deleted this memo will not be synced to Pimlical/Desktop, and that will likely result in the memo being unexpectedly restored to Pimlical/Android on the next DirectSync. When Pimlical/Android deletes a memo - the memo is just renamed with a DEL extension so that DirectSync can delete the corresponding memo in Pimlical/Desktop. So always try and delete memos from the Memo Selection List (use long-press to popup delete command).

If you leave the editor completely and subsequently navigate back to the home screen and tap on the Pimlical icon, this will relaunch Pimlical, displaying the memo selection list. Any changes you made in the external editor that were not saved will not be displayed in Pimlical and will be lost unless at some point you navigate back to the external editor and save the file.

Unless you need the power of an external editor, you may find Pimlical's built-in editor simpler to use because it avoids some awkward end conditions posed by the Android mechanism for launching and returning from external applications.

Memos in Pimlical are stored in the folder ....Pimlical/PimlicalMemos. The filename consists of the title (that you see displayed in the memo list), the category name (enclosed in square brackets), optionally [p] if the memo is protected, and a TXT extension.

Because the WebDAV protocol frequently used by Pimlical users to sync their Android devices fails to properly support date/time stamps on memos, the memo text always begins with [dts= followed by a long number that represents the time that the file was last modified (in milliseconds since 1-jan-1970 GMT), terminated with a closing square bracket. This Date/Time stamp is always stripped out whenever the memo text is displayed, or submitted to the internal editor, or the external editor as a file. If a memo file is found without any Date/Time stamp, it automatically gets assigned the memo file's lastModified date time as recorded by the operating system (which may not be correct if the file was written using the WebDAV protocol. In most cases though, this is not an issue that the user should ever be aware of. There is a debug command that will strip all the date/time stamps from the memos should the memos be migrated at some future time into some other application and the tags are no longer needed (see Menu | Debug | Strip Memo Tags).