Notices

Very helpful man, thanks again.

... or woman... either way

You might want to try Conboy out, you get some formatting ability like Notes, and in fullscreen mode there is no toolbar. It also allows hyperlinks between different notes. Conboy requires no saving, it always has your changes.

Also, you could try Notecase, which isn't in the maemo repositories, it's a nice little outliner with a lot of customizability. You can make it so no tool bar is visible, and also not display the outliner tree view, so you have a nice fullscreen to edit. Notecase also has an autosave feature.

http://notecase.sourceforge.net/download.html

Thanks for the advice. I tried both apps, but it looks like neither has the ability to control the size of the font very much, leaving me with lettering which is far too big to make effective use of the screen. Is there a way to gain finer control over font size in these apps (like there is in notes or leafpad)?

For Conboy, you could ask in the thread http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=28355

Done, thanks. Notecase pro is another option, but 35 euros is a little nutty, especially considering that I bought the n810 for about that much.

Ok, if anyone is looking for the same thing I am, conboy really is a good alternative. You get an actual full screen mode and realtime auto backups (from what i understand, haven't had the pleasure yet). As far as maximizing screen real estate (without going blind), I found two good options:
1) zoom out all the way, in once, then set the text to small and bold
2) zoom out all the way, in once, then set the text to normal and bold
Serves my needs pretty well so far.

On the downside, no undo function in conboy (nor manual save function). Which, as far as i understand, means that if you accidentally erase text in a note, it's gone for good.