I’ve been a fan of Zhorn Software’s Stickies for Windows, but now that I’ve switched to a Mac, I need to get all those stickies back.

First I had to find the stickies file on my Windows Laptop, located under C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR NAME]\Application Data\stickies\stickies.ini. I copied that to my Mac and wrote this little perl script to convert the stickies file to a bunch of little text files.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w


mkdir('stickies');
$i = 1;


while (<>)
{
s/.*\\fs20(.*)\\par\^M\}\^M$/$1/;
s/\\par\^M/\n/g;
# s/\r\n//g;
s/\\\{/\{/g;
s/\\\}/\}/g;
s/\\f[01]//g;
s/^\s+//g;

open(NOTE, ">stickies/$i.txt");
print NOTE $_;
close(NOTE);


$i++;
}


I ran it with

perl stickies.pl < stickies.ini

Then I ran Stickies and went to File > Import Text. I selected all files in the stickies folder and hit open.

Tada! My surrogate brain is back.