FYI, this project is listed as "retired." It may no longer function or I may just not be updating it anymore.
A new app is coming to replace nvALT: nvUltra. Sign up here for updates here.
Here’s a great introduction to nvALT in French.
nvALT 2 is a fork of the original Notational Velocity with some additional features and interface modifications, including MultiMarkdown functionality. It has been developed by Elastic Threads (David Halter) and Brett Terpstra, and made available for free (donations accepted).
Please report issues on GitHub, not on Twitter or via email. It helps keep everything manageable and avoids us having to answer the same questions in a hundred different tweets and messages. Along the same lines, please take a look at existing tickets before starting a new one.
Notational Velocity is a way to take notes quickly and effortlessly using just your keyboard. You press a shortcut to bring up the window and just start typing. It will begin searching existing notes, filtering them as you type. You can use ⌘J and ⌘K to move through the list. Enter selects and begins editing. If you’re creating a new note, you just type a unique title and press enter to move the cursor into a blank edit area. Check out the descriptions at notational.net for a more eloquent synopsis.
Want a great primer on using nvALT? See Michael Schechter’s nvALT 101.
Just download the file, double-click to unzip, then drag to your Applications folder.
If you’ve been using the original (or another fork of) Notational Velocity, you can install nvALT (which has the same application name) alongside the original application. nvALT uses its own preference file and database as of version 2.0. Previous users of Notational Velocity or nvALT will be greeted with the default settings when they first launch 2.0, and will need to set up preferences for color, sync, etc. again.
If you have a custom version of MultiMarkdown installed in ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown, nvALT will use it. If you don’t, it will just use its bundled version. No problem!
After the first time you run the Preview window, look in ~/Library/Application Support/Notational Velocity and you’ll find two files: template.html and custom.css. If you’re handy with HTML and CSS, feel free to customize these in whatever way you like. You can add Javascript as well, but you’ll need to load external scripts from a url or using a full file:// path. If worse comes to worst, you can just delete or rename your customizations and the default files will be put back in place automatically.
Note: Apparently our build is not particularly PowerPC compatible. Since we don’t have PPC machines to test on, it’s difficult to provide compatibility for them. We’ll do our best. In the meantime, it’s probably best for PPC users to hold off or use this experimentally only.
If you tried v2.1 and found yourself up a creek, here’s the 2.0 download link.
Please file any and all issues, questions, feature requests and suggestions in the GitHub issue tracker. We will respond to tickets as soon as we are able.
See the announcement post for more details on the current version (2.2b).
A fork of Notational Velocity with MultiMarkdown preview and advanced Markdown editing capabilities. Other good stuff.
Published 06/08/13.
Updated 09/19/17. Changelog
nvALT has its own update stream, so running Check for Updates from the application menu will give you updates only for this fork.
A new app is coming to replace nvALT: nvUltra. Sign up here for updates here..
For Safari and Chrome, browser extensions are available at Elastic Thread’s website. Clip selected link, text or entire page directly to nvALT, with optional use of Instapaper Mobilizer.
Also, an all-purpose bookmarklet by Alex Popescu brings some clipping goodness to everyone, including Firefox Users. Grab it at his site.
Source code for nvALT is currently available on GitHub. Bleeding edge features are developed in branches, but master is quite likely to be buggy, too. That’s how we roll.
Speaking of nvALT…
Brett is a writer and developer living in Minnesota, USA. You can follow him as ttscoff on Twitter, GitHub, Mastodon, and elsewhere.
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