Repo Review: FeatherNotes

by CgBoy

FeatherNotes is a lightweight and powerful hierarchical note manager with plenty of features. It has support for many text formatting options, embedding images and tables into notes, printing notes, password protection, searching, and more. FeatherNotes uses a node system, where essentially all hierarchical items in a note document are called nodes. You can create an assortment of parent and child sub-nodes, allowing for a great degree of organizational flexibility within note documents.

FeatherNotes is quite well laid out and easy to use. Most of the formatting options are easily available from the toolbar at the top. To the left of the text field is the node tree, where you can arrange and organize the nodes and sub-nodes that you create. A system tray icon can also be enabled from the preferences, allowing you to easily access the FeatherNotes window when you need it.

Once you create a new note document, you can begin adding nodes to it. By default, there is always one node already present in the document. You can add more nodes by right clicking on an already existing node and then selecting to either create a sibling or a child node. You can rename, assign tags, and even add icons to nodes. These nodes can then easily be rearranged by dragging them around in the node tree.

FeatherNotes gives you plenty of common text formatting options, such as bold, italic, underline, strike through, as well as text alignment, and text font and size. Images can easily be embedded by dragging and dropping them into the text field, and they can then be resized and placed to your liking. Tables can also be added and inserted into notes, as well as hyperlinks to internet addresses or local files. You can also change the text and background colors if you so wish. FeatherNotes has spell checking functionality, but one has to first configure the Hunspell dictionary path in the preferences.

FeatherNotes documents are saved in their own custom format, but you can also export them to HTML and PDF files. Printing is also available, and FeatherNotes gives you the option of printing out the whole document, or just one node at a time.

FeatherNotes also provides support for password protection to keep your notes private and secure. It appears to use a simple built-in encryption method, and the manual implies that you should not rely solely upon it for protecting highly sensitive information. Password protection can be enabled from the menu at the top.

Summary

All in all, I was quite impressed with the ease of use and features of FeatherNotes. I ran into no stability issues during my use of it, and in general found it to work really well. If you need a lightweight and feature-rich hierarchical note manager, then FeatherNotes is certainly a great option.