Show HN: Notational Velocity for Vim | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Notational Velocity for Vim

github.com

171 pointsyuppiemephisto33 comments

The description isn't that obvious for people that don't know what notational velocity is or how it works.

But to be fair, the first thing the readme says is a paraphrasing of the blurb at, and a link to, the notational velocity homepage.

Yes and I started reading that and went to nvAlt which was also mentioned. But it was frustrating to spend that much effort before even knowing what it was with some detail.

And the gif, which I usually like, suffers the same problem. Hard to follow unless you already know what it is.

In the end I decided it wasn't for me, tons of small files, each per note? Didn't seem that compelling to me, I think I would prefer one or a few larger files maybe something like vim-wiki.

But because I couldn't quickly research it feel I might have misunderstood it.

Thanks for pointing that out. I thought it is just some name OP chose.

It is just a note-taking app for Mac.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notational_Velocity)

That buries the lede a little.

NV has become popular because of its speed. Your notes are instantly searchable in the top bar of NV. You just type in what you're looking for, and the list of note files -- and they're all just text files -- limits itself to files that contain your search string, and it happens basically as fast as you can type.

It's pretty great. I used it heavily until I started using OrgMode a couple years ago, but missed it enough that I sought out an emacs mode (Deft) that is a workalike.

Not just. It's the best one!

Nah NVAlt is the best ;)

I changed it a bit.

I glued fzf and vimwiki together to do something very similar. If you have both of those tools installed, you can use a mapping like this:

nmap <Leader>wp :Files ~/git/vimwiki/<CR>

so that you're just a couple of keystrokes away from fuzzy finding any entry in your vimwiki.

I just use org mode.*

* Not really. This looks excellent. I just wanted to get the org mode boast dispatched with as soon as possible.

Well, no. That's not what we'd say to use for this (although you could). [Deft](https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/) would be a better comparison/equivalent.

Regarding OP, it looks very snappy! I like it. Looks like it leverages `fzf`. Can we swap it out for something else?

Deft was (around 3 or 4 years) my weapon of choice as well when I was using nvAlt. So, it was nvAlt (for times when I was in a random place on my Mac), Deft (for searching or adding from within emacs and 1Writer [1] from iOS, all were fed from a Dropbox folder.

Now (since January) though I have moved to use Bear [2] (non-free) on all my devices. Its use case is a bit different, but I like it better overall.

Side question: what do you suggest as alternative to fzf? fzf is excellent (a post I wrote on our engineering blog about using it for custom completions in zsh [3]), but I’m always eager to see new tools I can use.

[1] http://1writerapp.com/

[2] https://bear.app/

[3] http://engineering.affectv.com/aws/devops/2018/08/15/fzf-aut...

fzy percol peco

are all excellent alternatives

Thanks!

- Percol (Python): https://github.com/mooz/percol

- Peco (Go): https://github.com/peco/peco

- fzy (C): https://github.com/jhawthorn/fzy

skim [1] is a rust alternative that has an interactive mode [2] which makes it easy to drill down to more specific results.

[1] https://github.com/lotabout/skim [2] https://github.com/lotabout/skim#interactive-mode

Thanks, I was actually wondering why I had heard of no fuzzy searcher in Rust, seemed like a natural fit

Deft can easily be configured to generate org files by default.

Using emacs in a hidden scratch window under the i3 tiling window manager so that it is accessible by hotkey on all desktops. Using a journaling capture template for quickly adding notes. Not perfect, but quick enough.

Isn't editing existing notes fundamental to notational velocity UX? I have also been missing NV since leaving Mac OS is 2012. Shame the whole NV codebase is tied to Apple only frameworks. Nothing important about NV is even Mac specific; it is just three textboxes with well thought out key bindings; it's not using a bunch of fancy GUI framework features.

What OS are you using? If it's Windows, check out Resoph Notes. It's not open source but it is shareware and it's very good.

I've been doing a web version of NV for quite some time. I have a prototype but no time to finish. Need to find some, NV is awesome.

I believe that pressing Enter on a result opens the selected file as a buffer for editing. I think they mean that the plugin itself won't modify existing files, not that you can't modify existing files.

I made a JS/Electron based clone of nvALT a while back. Easier to hack on than an Objective-C codebase: https://github.com/wincent/corpus

But the node ecosystem has its own problems. I like the idea of doing everything in Vim.

If you're the wincent who made Command-T for Vim, thank you. I used it for years and years with great success.

This looks cool, but I have been happy with https://github.com/vhp/terminal_velocity - terminal based, I use it with vim but you can specify the editor.

Sorry what's the license of this?

Thanks for pointing that out, I created an issue.

This is cool! It's generic enough that it works not only with nvalt on Mac, but also with Notable on Linux (https://github.com/notable/notable)

Notable also uses markdown files for storing notes, so I just had to point the plugin search path to notable's notes directory, and it worked like a charm!

Please keep this usecase in mind when you make changes to your plugin going forward. Thank you!

Amazing! This is the vim plugin I’ve always wanted to write. I used Notational Velocity briefly on Mac before I switched to Linux/Windows machines during university and kinda never picked it up again. At this point vim movement is too critical and I can’t use GUI solutions well... so I’m very excited to see a fusion of the two!

So nice my two favorite apps nvim and nvalt got merged.

Anyone already tried it, how is it?

fzf is such a great addition to the command-line

Meta: these angle brackets got interpreted into the link.

Sorry; that's a bug and on our list to fix. I've edited the angle brackets out above.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20049765 and marked it off-topic.

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