The real power of your NV databank is that you can take it with you on your phone and access it from any web browser. NV syncs with the popular Simplenote web service, so any Simplenote client (including the iPhone Simplenote app, which is excellent) can access your notes. If you want to put a web page into NV, just copy the URL from the location bar of your web browser, switch to NV and press ⇧⌘V. NV will download the link and put the contents into a new note, complete with the original URL to remind you where it came from. Instant note from clipboardĬopy text from any application, go to NV and press ⇧⌘V to create a new note containing that text, with the first line as the note title. Now, whichever application you’re using, you can type your NV hotkey to bring NV to the front so that you can enter or look up a note. Click ‘Set…’ and type the keypress that you want to use. You can define a system-wide hotkey which will bring NV to the front (so long as it’s running): in Preferences, on the General tab, there is a setting for ‘Bring-to-Front Hotkey’. If you’re going to put everything into NV, and I recommend you do, then you’ll need to be able to access it quickly. If you put the word ‘recipe’ in the title, typing that will instantly find all your recipes.Ģ. NV works best with lots of short notes: for example, instead of one big note called ‘Recipes’, make separate notes: one for bolognaise, one for shepherd’s pie, one for cheesecake, and so on. If no note matches what you’ve typed, just press Enter to create a new note with that title. It’s easy to find notes: just start typing in the title area and NV searches as you type, listing all matching notes. You never need to save everything you type in is saved automatically. You can use it as a kind of external brain pack or databank: anything you think you might need again, stick it into NV. NV is a great place to keep text of any kind: In this article I’ll show you 10 power user tips and tricks to get the most out of nvALT. The original application has inspired various forks, of which nvALT is perhaps the best, and adds some very useful new features. Marginally-related, but too awesome to ignore: Worth a look in the land of text editors: Kieran Healy has helpfully mapped several text editors onto Lord of the Rings locations.Notational Velocity (NV) is a “modeless, mouseless Mac OS X note-taking application”, as the author describes it, which is elegant, attractive, and powerful. If you are looking for low-stress ways to turn your otters into actual writing, nvALT is worth a look. The arguably more exciting news is that Elastic Threads has released new browser extensions for Chrome and Safari that make it even easier to get information (either the current page, a linked page, or selected text) into your notes. That should make things more consistent for users. I mention all of this simply to point to two new developments this week: first, a new version has been released, and with it the announcement that, going forward, nvALT will merge with the main release of Notational Velocity. It’s the easiest way to get from “in my head” to “drafted” that I can think of. More generally, I can say that every piece of writing that I’ve done over the past 9 months or so that’s not an e-mail, a wiki contribution, or a Google Docs collaboration has been done in nvALT. Eddie Smith has often written about ways to use nvALT, and Caleb McDaniel has shown how to use Notational Velocity as an easy task management system (previously linked). LifeHacker has a video showing off the virtues of Notational Velocity here, and Ben Brooks explains some of the strengths of nvALT. Simple formatting is possible, and you can sync your notes across machines in a variety of ways. If what you’re typing matches text you’ve already entered, those notes come up for possible editing if what you’re typing is wholly new, then the app creates a new note. The basic idea of the app is that you just start typing. nvALT is a fork by Brett Terpstra and David Halter/Elastic Threads, of Notational Velocity, which is designed to be as friction-free a way to take notes as possible. NvALT is a Mac application that lies between conventional text editors and elaborate external-brain programs such as Evernote, DevonThink, and OneNote.
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