NvAlt: MultiMarkdown Notational Velocity fork with Markdown editing and preview | Hacker News Reader

NvAlt: MultiMarkdown Notational Velocity fork with Markdown editing and preview

github.com

9 pointsnateb202212 comments

Note nvUltra, the successor to this program, has been in development/private beta for several years[1,2].

I've been meaning to make my own web-based version of Notational Velocity that adds a few novel features of my own. (Plus inspiration from apps like TaskPaper and Drafts)

There are a lot of Notational Velocity clones; currently my favorite is: https://simplenote.com/

[1]: https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

[2]: https://nvultra.com/

Note that nvUltra, originally called BitWriter, has been in development for at least 8 years. In that time Bear, Ulysses, and now Obsidian have kind of eaten its lunch (among others).

nvUltra has been in private beta for a long while. I've signed up for beta keys multiple times and never received them. I wouldn't count on it coming out at this point, and when it does, I think it may be kind of stale compared to the competition.

I love Brett as a human, but IMHO, putting effort into acquiring a private beta key isn't worth the time. I have one.

It would be wrong to think of nvUltra as the new version of nvALT, for the most part. And, like you said, other products have eaten it's lunch.

From Brett Terpstra's blog just a few days ago:

>I’ve said this before, but I need to keep repeating it based on the number of queries I get. nvALT is at end of life, unless someone picks up the reigns and modernizes the (open source) code base. As it stands now, nvALT barely functions on modern OSs.

https://brettterpstra.com/2024/04/20/a-plea-to-nvalt-users/

Yeah, I got excited when I saw this and saw "nvAlt 2" in the title, thinking someone was forking and modernizing it. But this seems to just be a link to the original project.

I flagged this submission because nvAlt is and has, been obsolete for quite some time and does not run on most modern setups without some hacking. The nvAlt author is trying to get people to stop using it. In fact, the author reminded people of it being obsolete this weekend[1].

nvAlt's logical successor is nvUltra[2], which has been in beta and slow development for several years. Last I was in the private beta, the users forum was filled with complaints about the slow progress of development, so maybe keep that in mind before choosing nvUltra.

I was a long-time user of nvAlt and have since migrated to Obsidian[3]. With the Omnisearch plugin[4] and some UI settings adjustments, you can get pretty close to the nvAlt experience.

1. https://brettterpstra.com/2024/04/20/a-plea-to-nvalt-users/

2. https://nvultra.com/

3. https://obsidian.md

4. https://github.com/scambier/obsidian-omnisearch (but install from within Obsidian itself)

The reason I wrote KeenWrite[1] is because, to my knowledge, there are no Markdown editors that support interpolated variables. Why aren't document variables more common?

[1]: https://keenwrite.com/

I used to love this program. Alas, it is very out-of-date. The best alternative I've yet found is The Archive:

https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

Obsidian is very similar and extremely popular right now too.

Note: this has been abandoned in favor of http://nvultra.com/

Last time I checked nvalt was working just fine.

Brett has been talking about nvultra for many years...at the time of creation nv and nvalt were novel, but I believe they've been superseded by things like obsidian and notation velocity. Still, best of luck of nvultra.

That page makes it sound like the text in images isn't indexed. I wonder if it's just a matter of priorities, or if there is some other reason for not indexing text in images?

Both macOS and Windows have very good text recognition APIs now. Indexing text in images is starting to feel like table stakes for notetaking apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com