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Notational Velocity

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70 pointssabalaba31 comments

I used Notational Velocity but I switched a couple of years ago to one of its forks: nvALT:

http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

Which adds a lot of very useful features, I can heavily recommend it.

dumb Q: is this for apple OS only?

Yes, but it stores the actual notes as txt files in a directory so you can use other software alongside it in a multi platform environment.

Thanks, so is there a windows equivalent?

Closest equivalent I've found and use is ResophNotes (http://resoph.com/). Works well with nvALT.

I use NValt as well, but I held out for a while because I thought a new, possibly commercial, version might be on the horizon from the original developer, Zachary Schneirov. This was based on the following interview with him, which, BTW, offers some interesting background on NV.

An interview with Notational Velocity developer Zachary Schneirov

http://suratlozowick.com/blog/2011/12/notational-velocity-de...

Edit: As an aside, this is an interesting comment from the above (2011) interview:

> Now the first company to sell a mass-market wearable computer with a glasses-mounted display would get my money in an instant.

If you live inside emacs like I do there's a great mode named Deft[1] that emulates the important parts of NV, written by Jason Blevins who also wrote Markdown Mode. It's great for editing my personal wiki[2].

[1]: http://jblevins.org/projects/deft/

[2]: http://www.petekeen.com/git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki

And Org-mode

I found the various NV apps to be far quicker to pick up and use than Org-mode, though YMMV.

And http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-velocity.html which implements nv on top of org mode :)

There's a (imo) superior fork called nvALT: http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

I just posted its same link. Brett Terpstra makes so many amazing little script.

Here's a cross-platform opensource clone: https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy

How does it compare? do you use it?

Simplenote is an iOS app that syncs with this. It's a joy to use.

http://simplenote.com/

What are some good use case for this app? I have downloaded it couple of years back, but didn't find any use of it.

I use it for text all the time - blog post drafts (that I tend to finish in iA Write), scratchpads, things to remember…

The search interface is absolutely fantastic and it stores files as .txt which is great and much more lightweight than Evernote.

I use Evernote for all my serious text storage needs, but nvAlt (a really great fork of NV linked elsewhere) is just so damn fast that capturing whatever random bit of information is frictionless.

I tend to use it these days as a scratchpad: git SHAs, URLs to check out later that I don't want to save to pinboard, tasks for the next hour (try putting @done at the end of a line!)...

Make nvAlt save its notes as txt files to your Dropbox to get syncing across computers.

For me, it's my text file junk drawer. And I mean that in a good way.

Often I need a file to reformat some text or a file to temporarily hold a snippet of text. All this goes into NV. It's _frictionless_ so, for these files, I don't have to think what to name them or where to save them. Just open the app and start typing or paste. The text is there and it is automatically saved.

Instead of composing longish text in the browser (textarea), I now use NV and don't worry about losing stuff due to browser crashes, etc.

Pre-NV, these text files were throwaways. They'd typically be saved on my desktop for a few days or not saved at all in the case of a quick dump. Now they are saved (without me thinking about it) and on a number of occasions it has been helpful to have the archive.

Lately I've been trying to add a little organization to some notes with inspiration from this idea of Semantic Notes [1].

BTW, I use NValt as many others have suggested.

[1]: http://www.abolish.me/blog/semantic-notes

I use it for pretty much everything in life that I want to remember.

I use a trick Merlin Mann mentioned in one of his podcasts, where he prefixes each note title with a category. So I have life, work, snippets (for code), and a few others.

But I rarely browse, as the search functionality just can't be beat. Some example notes are

- trip planning (hotel, flight info, museums) - meeting notes at work (tons of these) - electricians I've called to get quotes from - list of conferences I want to attend this year - names and phone numbers of my neighbors - gift ideas - favorite wines - favorite quotes

I have the app bound to command-shift-tilde so it's always very easy to access. Then I use the app Notesy on my iPhone which searches just as quickly.

What I like best about this system is

- super fast search - quick synching - plain text (not some proprietary locked in format) - keeping (almost) everything here means I don't need to load up different apps (a meeting notes app, a wine list app, a snippet app) or think about where to store things

I have bound it to alt+space and use it for everything.

Try binding it to a keyboard shortcut and just using it for a bit. It quickly becomes your extension brain.

It's great for maintaining a personal wiki; notes can have links to other notes.

In plain text files mode, syncing via Dropbox works great.

I don't read much on the interent without taking notes on it. I have contexts of knowledge groupings that I maintain over time. NV makes is really quick (cmd-m) brings the window to focus, and I start typing to search for existing files, or I (cmd-l) and create a new file.

I was an evernote user, but i like the plain text storage, the DropBox syncing, and the abity to access my files from my phone/iPad. I use FlickNote on my Android phone to reference the documents.

Some of my favorite things I store: 1) Business words/term I'm not familiar with 2) Marketing/industry buzzwords 3) I have files on different technologies where I link to different articles, short summaries of things I've learned in articles, etc...

In short, I use it almost like a custom/manual index of my internet.

Edit: I use nvALT, btw. Just realized my comment might be out of context of this.

One other tip that I use all the time: I have cmd-shift-e bound to open MOU markdown editor for those notes that will eventually need formatting (things like documentation, blog posts, etc.)

Based on the name, I was sure this was going to be an academic paper (or maybe a mathematician's blog musings) on the rate at which "standard" mathematical notation changes over time, with interesting historical examples and analysis of current trends, maybe with a specific mention of the Tau Manifesto.

Emacs + org-mode + remember/capture does all of this and much more. The system is very powerful and because I synchronize my calendar with org-mode I can also quickly capture TODOs, EVENTs, notes, bookmarks, ideas, TOREADs, journal entries, etc...

Plus you then have all of the amazing tools in Emacs at your disposal :) Custom Agenda views is one of my favorite pieces about org-mode; linking to other org files, the list of amazing things in this software can go on for quite some time.

And if you're looking for something browser-based, I've been using a chrome extension called syncpad, for about a year now. Does the job.

I was hoping that Notational Velocity is a measurement and method that could quantify how good given notation is for given family of problems.

I love this application. I use it everyday.

I have used NV, but switched to Nottingham. Syncs with Simplenote, supports Dropbox, less buggy.

Thanks for posting this, I've been searching for a great not app for quite a while.

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