Elephant

A lot of people have a hard time organizing their tasks on a daily basis and most of the time, simply taking the time to write down notes can considerably improve their productivity. Elephant is one of the apps that can help you in this regard.

One of the great things about this utility is that it can be made portable by simply selecting its note folder to be located on your USB stick and running it from the same location. This way, you can move it to other computers, depending on where you need to work.

Also, you can launch it and enjoy its functionality only on computers where Java is already installed.

Although Elephant is meant to assist both beginners and experts in their work, the user interface might take a little time getting accustomed to. Luckily, there are several sample notes to get you started, so you should take the time to browse through them before diving in.

The entries you create are grouped in notebooks and you can assign them tags with only a few mouse clicks. Word count and note count are also supported.

Once you created your note, you can drag and drop images and turn your plain text to rich text by making the letters bigger or smaller, and formatting the font to underline, italic, bold or strike-through.

You can search for previously assigned tags with dedicated Markdown commands or you can use shortcuts.

Elephant can come in handy provided you take the time to discover its functions and get used to its syntax - which should not be too much of a hassle if you are already familiarized with Markdown.