Perpetual Notes

Perpetual Notes is a nice, free initiative that aims at making things easier for you. The creators’ mantra is free, easy, no-sign-up-needed. It is true, nowadays it becomes increasingly frustrating having to make an account each time you need to install a picture viewer or going through thorough verification processes just to use any slightly-more-than-basic random app. Perpetual Notes tries to change this by offering a registration-free service.

Firstly, the app is a portable program which means it is located in one folder alongside its other files; each time you open it, you will resume your work from where you left, meaning it will remember your preferences. You can create, open, write, and save files only in the RTF format. For other formats, you can read and edit them, but it requires some steps.

Any other formats are only supported in the read-and-write mode and after you’ve done some minimal adjustments (which comes as an unintuitive and confusing thing for the end-user): check the following boxes from ‘View’: read-only/read-and-write + ‘Show all files’. Trying to open a file from the generally known path File > Open > (select the file) won’t work. Instead, the ‘Show all files’ option will list all the documents with the following formats: TXT, MD, CSV.

In terms of note-taking capabilities, the app will do everything you can expect — does text formatting, has rich color and font palettes, inserts tables, does highlight, can insert bullets and numbered lists, etc. (however, the numbered lists do not behave as expected – when hitting ‘Enter’ they do not generate the consecutive number - instead, indentation on a new row is added, but no number).

The search-in-all-files, search individually, find-and-replace functions are useful and work well. The spell check is a list of words saved in the same folder as the app (which means you can add your own words there, too); using it, however, it is really frustrating because you can activate it, but pressing the same shortcuts won’t make the highlight go away (re-opening the app won’t do it either as the program is portable and remembers last commands; upon testing, other intuitive manners of disabling the spell check were not found either).

In conclusion, the app lacks the ability to be super intuitive and addresses a more knowledgeable user, one who has a thorough practical knowledge of computers (e.g., when trying to access from the ‘View’ section the ‘Advanced search,’ this will open the Command Prompt). Some minor bugs it has are quite inconvenient as well.

However, despite the program being able to handle, as expected, only RTF files, it is a highly valuable thing, as these formats are incredibly popular because they can be used cross-platform and have a high level of compatibility with some of the most popular OSes (Windows, Mac, Linux); for example, due to these reasons, they are still used in creating documentation. That’s why, if you are looking for a note-taking app that will save your files in RTF, consider giving Perpetual Notes a try.