Add a “Built-In” Notepad to Google Chrome

Are you tired of having to open external text programs every time you need to save a few notes? Now you can add a “built-in” notepad to Google Chrome with the Chromepad extension.

Installation

You will be prompted with the following message window asking you to confirm installation of the extension. Click “Install” to finish adding Chromepad to Google Chrome…



Once installation is complete you will see this message displayed along with your new “Toolbar Button”.



Options

You can use one of three methods to access the options for Chromepad. The first is by right clicking on the “Toolbar Icon”, the second is using the “Chrome Extensions Page”, and the third is using the menu in the drop-down window itself.



This is what the “Options Page” currently looks like. The main area of interest is the “LocalStorage Text Box”…



If you have had notes from an older version of the extension “disappear” when you update to the newest version then they will be found here. You can “re-add” them back to the drop-down window. This is an example from one of our portable installs when we updated to the newest version…



Chromepad in Action

When you click on the “Chromepad Toolbar Button” you will see a small drop-down text window like this. There is also a small and very useful menu included.



If you need to resize the window while adding notes you can do so easily using the “Extend Grip” in the lower right corner of the text window.

Note: The drop-down window will return to the default size shown above when closed and then reopened.



At the moment you can not select a default font for the text so your text may appear slightly different based on the font settings in your browser. As you can see the notes that we typed for our example look very nice. What is even better is that your notes are saved for the next time (after you restart your browser)…simply open the text window and start where you previously left off.

Note: You will not be able to add images to the notes.



If you prefer you can even detach the drop-down window from the browser…definitely a nice touch.



Conclusion

Chromepad is an extremely useful (and highly recommended) extension for Google Chrome to help you keep track of the notes that you collect throughout the day.

Links

Download the Chromepad extension (Google Chrome Extensions)