tomboy-ng VS Core

The already mentioned LibreOffice Writer suggested by others is great. There are lighter weight note taking options like tomboy notes if you’re not looking for a full word processor necessarily.

There's also Tomboy, whose original C# development stopped in 2017. The successor, tomboy-ng, was rewritten in Pascal, of all things.

P.S. I think that a special mention for Tomboy-NG is needed. Is a rewrite of a old Tomboy application, removing Mono dependencies

Ultibo is amazing for this kind of stuff:

https://ultibo.org/

My concern is that the Pi Zero boards are short on memory - Chromium can be best described as a pain on these boards... Possibly something like Ultibo could be used to give you a bare metal front end. This would give good performance but it may be a steep learning curve if you have not come across the development toolset (Pascal derived)...

Nope

>Note that the Raspberry Pi Pico is not supported by Ultibo core as it is based on a microcontroller instead of a microprocessor and is not able to support the features required by Ultibo core.

https://github.com/ultibohub/Core

https://ultibo.org/wiki/Supported_Hardware

One possible option is to use https://ultibo.org/ - it's based around Free Pascal but the result runs on almost 'bare metal' so it's fast starting and quick to run. You would need to agree with the GNU LGPL version 2.1 licence but there is an exception for closed source development. Though you can draw graphics by direct access to the video buffer it's really designed for character output as there are no tools for buttons / windows etc.

It doesn't necessarily mean assembly, just the absence of a separate operating system. It looks like Ultibo is mostly written in Pascal, with a small amount of inline assembly to initialize the hardware, etc.

https://github.com/ultibohub/Core/blob/master/source/rtl/ult...