Jovial Notepad: An Excellent Notepad App Under 50KB

Jovial Notepad is a free and open source notepad application for Windows that packs quite a punch despite its small size. The portable notepad software weights just under 50KB but is furnished with a set of tools that makes creating and editing notes easier while still keeping the software uncomplicated.

Jovial Notepad supports rich text formatting which alone sets the application a step apart and ahead of Microsoft Notepad and plenty of other notepad replacements. Features supported under “Rich text” are changing of font type, font size, and font color, making text underline, bold, italics, strikethrough etc. You can also insert images and save the file as RTF. Aside from rich text editing, Jovial Notepad has the following functionalities.

Quick Symbols: The Quick Symbols menu includes a set of commonly used special characters that can be quickly inserted into a note. The best part is – this menu can be edited. Characters can be removed and added allowing you to maintain a curated list of special symbols that you frequently use.

The content of the Quick Symbols menu is controlled by a TXT file that contains these characters in human readable format. All you need to do is edit this file while adhering to the syntax specified, and you’ll have your own personalized Quick Symbols menu.

Encryption: Jovial Notepad lets you keep your notes encrypted. Unlike file encryption software, Jovial Notepad encrypts the text or the contents of the file, rather than the file itself. An encrypted text file still has the TXT extension and can still be opened in another text editor, but the contents appear garbled and nonsense. The encrypted content can be decrypted only by entering the correct pass key.

There is no information about how secure the encrypted notes are or the type of encryption scheme used, so don’t use it to store mission critical information, until we can find out more about its security. But I guess, it should be secure enough to keep secret notes, shopping list of Christmas gifts you don’t want your spouse to find out, etc.

Other Features: It includes a Find & Replace tool, a way to convert case of selected text to uppercase, lowercase and titlecase, wordwrap, clickable hyperlinks, and real-time character count in the status bar.