Take notes quickly in a sidebar with the Nine Notes extension for Firefox
Nine Notes is an extension for Firefox that allows you to take notes quickly. When you install the add-on, an icon is placed on the toolbar. Clicking on it opens a sidebar, which is the interface of the extension. It is quite minimalistic.
You will see 5 tabs in the sidebar, one for each note. Press the X button in the top right corner of the panel to close the sidebar. Go to the add-on’s options to enable up to nine note tabs.
There is no way to rename or rearrange the tabs. The settings page also includes options to enable a dark theme, set the font size and type.
The Nine Comments text box is just a large text field. You can type anything in there to save it. There is no support for formatting text or adding images. The add-on has soft wrap (word wrap) enabled by default; you can switch it through the settings.
Highlight text on web pages and right-click on the selection to open the browser context menu. You will see an option that says “Send to 9 notes”. This submenu has its own child menu, which can be used to select the “note number” to which you want to send the content. For e.g. Sent to 9 notes> # 5.
Nine Notes has no search option, so if you jot down something in one of the notes and don’t remember where you saved it, there is no direct way to find it. You can paste the content into a text editor to find the content you were looking for.
The extension seems to be inspired by an old add-on called QuickNote. However, unlike Nine Notes, it cannot be used from a pop-up window i.e. it works as a sidebar tool. The extension does not support sticky notes or reminders. One of the developer’s comments on the add-on’s reviews page mentioned that Nine Notes supports a keyboard shortcut on Ubuntu: Shift + Alt + N. It also works fine on Windows.
Nine Notes is not open source and doesn’t require any special permissions to run. The limitation to having only 9 note tabs can be a drawback for some. There doesn’t seem to be a word limit per tab, so theoretically you could have endless notes. But this is a note-taking program, not a text editor, although you can use it as a program. Click HERE to install this extension.