Deleting Dreamweavers _notes folders

If you’re like me and you decide not to use the ‘Design Notes’ or the synchronisation features of Dreamweaver at all (or at least not very often) and/or you use other FTP clients to transfer files and/or pass site files over to other designers to work on then you have probably been bugged to have to manually remove all of the ‘_notes’ folders that Dreamweaver makes inside every folder of your site.

I’d gotten tired of doing this manually so I thought I’d make a quick and dirty solution to it, after a little it of work using Mac OSX’s Automator application I created a script which looks for all instance of folders named ‘_notes’ and then puts them in the trash. So all I have to do now is run this application every so often and then they all get dumped in the trash leaving my folders clear and ready to pass on to someone else or upload using another FTP client.

Presenting ‘Delete _notes’

Icon for 'Delete _notes' applicationThe application was pretty simple to make using Automator and was saved as a proper ‘.app’ package application. I then went and made little icon for the file instead of the generic icon, again this is fairly quick and dirty (admittedly it looks like it’s for deleting Dreamweaver itself!!!) but it looks ok.

I then packaged the app into an installer using the PackageMaker application that is part of Apple’s developer tools to make it easy to install. Although the application can run from anywhere on your machine the installer will put it in the ‘Applications’ folder, but you can change this to any location you want.


Download ‘Delete _notes’

I’ve made the app available here to download in case it’s of any use to anyone, it wasn’t terribly complicated to build but maybe it could be useful? Please remember that you use this at your own risk, no warranty or guarantee is given or implied. You should always make sure you have backed up all files before running potentially risky software that intends to delete files like this one! That said it runs fine on my machine running Leopard and does what it was intended to do.

If that hasn’t put you off then go ahead and download it! I’ve zipped it up so it’s only about 120Kb in size

» Delete_notes.mpkg.zip

Addendum: It is possible to stop ‘_notes’ folders being made in the first place

Just in case you weren’t aware that you can stop the ‘_notes’ folders being made in the first place then I should link to an Adobe Technote explaining it. I’ve been confused by this in the past so it’s probably worth linking to here so that if you don’t want the _notes files created at all then you can do so, rather than running the ‘Delete _notes’ application all the time!

Read the Technote : "An _notes folder and dwsync.xml file are created even when the preference is turned off in the site definition"

~Rick

6 Replies to “Deleting Dreamweavers _notes folders

  1. What a great idea!

    The Dreamweaver _notes files are the single most annoying byproduct of the app. Particularly since you have to uncheck multiple options to switch it off and even then it may choose not to remove the folders it's created.

    Well done for coming up with this.

  2. One thing that I found rather annoying is that if you are not defining Remote or Testing information BUT the check box is still checked for that configuration, then you will still get the _notes folder created.

    For instance, I do not define Remote Info on my sites. So, I had to go into each of my Sites, Goto the Remote Info Section (in Advanced mode), select Access to anything other than None, uncheck Maintain synchronization information as well as Automatically upload files to server on save – to be certain – and then set the Access back to None.

    Once I did that on all my sites, I _notes folder was no longer magically appearing.

    Hope that helps you situation.

  3. Hi Alain,
    I tried to send an email to you but it bounced back. Can you let me know an address I can contact you on?

    Please just try running the app again, the script actually does label the _notes files red first then deletes them, but sometimes it seems to only label them for some reason!

  4. Hi Rick,
    Thanks for the little app. I ran it a couple of times (OS X 10.5.4).

    I get asked "Are you sure you want to remove all those annoying _notes folders?", I click OK. Then the app runs for a while and then quits by itself.

    However, there are still "_notes" folders in my local DW site on my hard disk. But the folders are labeled "red"; I don't know if I did that in the past or if your app did that.

    Am I missing something? Aren't the folders supposed to get deleted?

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