QOwnNotes is a plain-text note taking application with markdown support and cloud storage syncing for your notes. It is an open-source application and works in all the popular platforms like Windows, Linux and Mac OS. It does not require installation and is fully portable. You can take notes on any device and they are synced over the cloud to all of your devices where QOwnNote is being used. But for the syncing, you have to configure the cloud server settings which looks a little complicated as it requires installing components on the web server as well as on the Desktop PC.
It supports the use of markdown to format your notes and add special elements such as headings of various sizes, making text bold, italic etc. You can also insert pictures, URLs and other things easily. Since it is a markdown note editor, you can use the commonly used markdown codes such as enclosing text in double asterisks to make it bold. It even displays full cheatsheet for markdown editing where you can learn about all these codes for formatting your notes. But it also gives a toolbar from where you can use different shortcuts to edit and format your text, insert images, insert URLs and so on.
You can save your notes to the local storage, export them as PDF documents, or have them printed on the local printed. If you have sensitive or private information in these notes, then you can encrypt these notes as well. The encryption cipher used by QOwnNotes is very strong AES 256 which gives you peace of mind as this encryption cannot be broken. Encrypting notes on your computer also encrypts them on the cloud server and therefore on all the other devices using QOwnNotes with the same cloud credentials.
You can download QOwnNotes from https://www.qownnotes.org/.