Sensible Note Taker

Sensible Note Taker is an approachable and resourceful utility that permits you to create notes in a user-friendly environment, organize them into different tabs, export data to file, and back up everything. It's easy to use even by inexperienced users.

The setup procedure is over in just a few seconds. The only notable aspect about it is that Sensible Note Taker offers to integrate itself into the Windows startup to automatically run each time you boot the computer. As told by the app, this option affects only the currently logged user and can be later disabled.

It's wrapped in a clean and intuitive window that doesn't put emphasis on looks but it's simple to navigate. You can write or paste notes, create as many tabs as you want to organize them, use a basic search-and-replace function (match case, whole words only), or cut, copy, paste, delete or select all text.

The status bar shows the current time, day and date, and you can insert it into the note with one click, as well as change the date/time format. What's more, if you create a list, you can sort the selected lines or all content in ascending or descending order, or randomly. Undoing and redoing your actions is possible.

All notes in all tabs can be backed up to file (Sensible Note Taker format) and later restored. Automatic backups are activated by default, and you can disable them, set the frequency (hourly, daily, weekly), limit the number of backups to preserve free space on the disk, or change their default saving directory.

It's also possible to disable word wrapping mode, set the text alignment (left, center, right), modify the font type and background color for the current tab or all of them, hide the toolbar and status bar, or view a counter with the total words, characters, lines, and lines of text (in the current tab only).

Tabs can be individually saved to file (.txt or .rtf format). You can prepare the page for printing by setting the paper size, orientation and margins, change the tabs order (alphabetically, times used, times accessed, key presses, amount of text, date created), hide any selected tabs from sight, as well as remove any one of them.

When it comes to program preferences, you can make Sensible Note Taker run at Windows startup, configure a hotkey for quickly showing and hiding the tool, minimize it to the systray, set the frame to stay on top of other windows, adjust its transparency, and specify the autosave frequency.

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, since the app didn't hang, crash or show errors. Unsurprisingly, CPU and RAM consumption was low. Although it's rather intuitive to work with, it also contains a help file.

Sensible Note Taker comes loaded with some handy features for taking notes and creating backups. Too bad that it hasn't been updated for a long time.