8 reasons to abandon note-taking in favor of Notepad
Technologies / / December 29, 2020
There are many note programs, and you probably use at least one of them. All of them are beautiful and sophisticated, and are synchronized with the clouds, and they have built-in search.
But if you look, Notion, Evernote, OneNote and other similar applications can replace the built-in "Notepad", which is present in all versions of Windows. It has a number of undeniable advantages.
1. Notepad is very light and fast
Monsters like Evernote and OneNote are just huge harvesters that sometimes take too long even on modern devices. If a magnificent idea, then there is no time to wait for the note-booker to open - the idea will disappear from the head, the inspiration will pass, and the writing is gone.
Notepad takes less than 2 MB of RAM and starts instantly on any system. One click and you have a blank page. No waiting.
2. "Notepad" is free
How many great posts have been spoiled by their monetization system. In some programs, you cannot use some of the functions until you pay for a subscription. In other free versions the number of synchronized devices is limited. Still others are available only after payment and do not have a free option at all.
Notepad doesn't cost a dime, it's already preinstalled in Windows. No subscriptions, no payments.
3. TXT format is universal
Each note-taking program stores your notes in its own proprietary format. Try exporting a notebook with thousands of files from Evernote to OneNote and see why it's bad. Records are lost, tags are lost, dates are forgotten - when you have a lot notes, this is a catastrophe.
Simple TXT files can be easily opened anywhere. You can easily access your recordings even after 20 years, because TXT is a universal and widespread format. These are not documents for you old word processors like WordPerfect.
Are you tired of Notepad or Microsoft decided to remove it in the new, conditional Windows 20? Install Atom, Typora, Notepad ++ and keep reading and writing notes as if nothing happened.
In addition, thanks to the versatility of the TXT format, it can be opened on any operating system, not only Windows - for example, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS.
4. Easily sync notes
When your note manager starts asking for money and refuses to connect more than two or three devices to your account without a paid subscription, it's very frustrating.
Notepad won't do that. Select a folder with your notes and place it anywhere cloud storage your choice: Google Drive, OneDrive, your own server with Nextcloud, or wherever you go. Has stopped arranging this cloud? Copy a folder to another in a minute! No hassle with exporting and converting files from one format to another.
5. Easy to create backups
Using services for storing notes, you completely trust your data to the developers. If those have problems with servers or backups, you will be helpless and will not be able to recover the lost information yourself. "We have technical difficulties, sorry."
If your base of notes is a folder with text files, then creating a backup copy is a matter of a couple of minutes. Any program can handle this for backups, and nobody canceled "copy - paste".
6. No restrictions on file organization
In some Evernote, you cannot sort notebooks as you wish - you can only combine them into a group, but not nest one notebook into another, like folders. And in the same Simplenote, there are no notebooks or folders at all, there are only tags and you cannot remove an unnecessary note out of sight into a folder called "Disassemble later". Developers will decide for you what you need and what you can do without.
When you create notes in Notepad, you can sort them however you like, because they are regular files. Put them in folders, assign them names, pin folders with them in the side menu "Explorer", on the taskbar, in the "Start" menu - in general, have fun as you like.
7. You are in control of your files
Notepad text files on your disk belong only to you. Favorite service for storing notes or to-do lists may close, giving you a couple of months to export the data. Didn't have time, forgot, didn't see the notification? The records are lost.
The TXT folder stored on your hard drive will not do this. It can lie on the disk for a couple of decades, and nothing will happen to it if the disk itself is in order. And backups perfectly save from hardware problems.
8. Privacy and security at altitude
This follows from the previous point. Since the data is stored with you, and not with the company that owns the note-taking, you can do whatever you want with it. Do you want to encrypt them? Please, a bunch of programs to choose from for such purposes. Or you can use built-in tools systems. Want to hide? Place it in an archive with a password, or at least in a hidden folder.
Villainous hackers will not be able to steal your ideas by hacking another hype service. Because all your thoughts are safely stored on your own disk, and not on a server overseas.
Besides the mentioned advantages, Notepad has disadvantages. But they can be easily dealt with.
- There is no built-in search like Evernote or OneNote. It can be replaced by Windows 10 Search, which is no worse. Type a word or phrase from a note in the Start menu and the system will find it.
- No text formatting. If desired, you can decorate the text with symbols. We made a title, underlined it with several symbols "-" or "=" in the line below. Particularly important places can be highlighted with _lower underscore_ or CAPS. And if you study Markdown markupthen you can write texts with titles and links.
- Pictures and attachments cannot be added to the note. In Markdown, by the way, you can still attach images and links to pages on the Internet. But if we are talking about regular Notepad files, just put pictures and other elements in the same the folder where the note itself is located, and name them similarly so that the system displays them in the "Explorer" nearby.
- You can't check the to-do list like you do with Evernote and Google Keep. But you can create a list, marking each item with a "-" or a dash, and in completed cases, put down crosses - "x". This is the logic behind ToDo.txt system.
How do you like this way of keeping records?
Read also🧐
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