ShirusuPad is without doubt one of the best desktop notes taking applications for the Windows operating system. Two things that make it stand out are the low resource usage while running on the computer system and the features that it ships with.
It actually uses less than 700 Kilobytes of computer memory while running on the system, barely noticeable one can say in times when computers have Gigabytes of RAM installed. Its feature set is the other thing that is standing out. The application can be displayed on the computer desktop at all time or in the system tray depending on the needs of the user.
ShirusuPad
The main interface makes use of tabs to categorize notes into different groups. The window is fully scalable to display as many information as needed on the screen at once. Several skins are available to change the design of the desktop notes taking application. There is also an option to change the opacity of the window if you want other windows to be visible while the program is on top of them.
You find these options attached to the top left of the screen (which you can turn off with a right-click on the program icon in the system tray). Hover over any switch there to toggle the functionality, for instance to make the program window stay on top of other program windows automatically.
A right-click in the editor pane displays various editing options, for instance to enable word wrap, add date and time automatically, import data from text files, or use find and replace.
One thing that you may want to do is open the preferences to adjust the font size by switching to a custom theme. The default font size may have worked well on Windows 95 or older versions of Windows, but you may probably come to the conclusion that it is too small for HD displays.
You can disable the autostart of the program in the preferences as well, and enable and configure some of the advanced features.
What makes the application stand out are its features for the most part. Some of the more interesting ones are the ability to define hotspots on the desktop that will display notes if the mouse is hovered there for a time, url highlighting, the ability to capture clipboard items automatically and paste them into a pre-configured tab in the application, and reminders that inform you about a specific event in regular intervals using various means including sounds or popups.
ShirusuPad can be downloaded from the official homepage of the software developer. It is compatible with most versions of the Windows operating system starting with Windows 95 and going all the way up to Windows 10 at the time of writing.
While that is the case, development seems to have stopped in 2003 with ShirusuPad 1.1b beta being the latest version available for public download.
Closing Words
ShirusuPad has been abandoned and while you cannot expect updates or new features to be released because of this, it is fair to say that the program works fine on all recent versions of Windows. If you are looking for a lightweight note taking application, this one should be on your radar as it delivers that.