I always have a small spiral-bound notepad beside my PC for ad-hoc notes. I'm interested in finding a PC-based replacement, especially for transient notes that may need to be copied and pasted around.
I don't think it's a new concept, so I'm sure other applications have addressed it in the past, but I can't seem to find any easily.
Desired features:
- Simple: pretty much no toolbars, no menus, no configuration, no complexity, just a persistent free text entry area, like a blank notepad page
- Edit-tracking: being able to go back in time somehow, but in a very basic fashion. Perhaps every time you clear the text area, it saves the old contents as read-only, stamped with date and time, and makes it easy to flip backwards (perhaps Alt+Left Arrow, or perhaps mouse wheel, or perhaps zoom out to a day / week / month view)
- Ideally, cloud-enabled, synced with Google Docs or similar
The idea is to use it for transient notes, working state, small idea snippets. For this, it's vital that there is no management burden, so that the barrier to putting text in is minimal. If you have to think about configuration, metadata, which file, where, categorization etc., the chances are the idea will slip away. It needs to be as barrier-free to use as picking up a pen and putting it on paper.
Does this utility already exist? Or do I have to write it myself?