It seems that the "Notes" tab in the "File Properties" dialog is gone in Nautilus 3.2.1/Ubuntu 11.10. How can you use the notes feature now? What do you do about notes that you have already made? Is there a patch or an extension for this, or is it planning to be fixed in the future? (Why was it removed?) (Related question about portability of notes.)
A similar question to this was asked from "Emblems and Backgrounds" and I'm afraid its a similar answer.
The Gnome Devs thought these capabilities were rarely used and in-order to streamline the codebase they removed this as core GUI functionality.
Fortunately, the same terminal based commands can be used since the metadata capabilities have been retained:
for example, here is a v11.10 nautilus screen-shot with notes added via the command line.
As to "is it planning to be fixed" - again a similar answer - like "emblems" - this is regarded as third-party supported - i.e. not core nautilus capabilities.
I'm not aware of anybody deciding to take on this challenge - so here is my poor substitute:
Choosing the right-click menu option Notes displays the notes for a file which you can amend.
To do this I used my answer to this Q&A to execute the following file:
#!/bin/bash
# basic - and I mean basic bash script to display & set notes
#
# feel free to enhance!
#
# fossfreedom (askubuntu) 27/12/11
notestext=`gvfs-info $1 | grep annotation | sed s/' metadata::annotation: '/''/g`
newnotes=`zenity --entry --width=500 --title=$1 --text="current notes:" --entry-text="$notestext"`
# handle the case where the user has pressed cancel
if [ $? = 1 ]; then
exit
fi
# ok - got this far - lets change the notes for the file selected
gvfs-set-attribute -t string $1 metadata::annotation "$newnotes"
Zenity doesn't support multiple line entry - a more robust pythondialog type implementation will be required... my python skills aren't up-to this job though!
