Nerds might roll their eyes – a detour through the history and utility of nvALT would be an undertaking of its own – but nvALT remains as useful as ever, despite being eclipsed by a new wave of notes apps in the past couple of years. nvALT was tool of choice for quick text capture where keyboard ninjas were concerned.
#Mac notational velocity mac
Where haste is concerned, for a long time there was a pretty clear favourite among the mac community. Which brings me back to the aforementioned problem. Plain text also has one more significant advantage, the speed at which you can work with it. For that reason, I find myself only using Apple Notes as a kind of place holder for links I will use immediately, or when very basic collaboration is in order.Ī plain text system is the antithesis of proprietary, it is as open as you can get for storing text. Rich text relies on a proprietary database, meaning portability and future-proofing are open questions for notes kept in a system that relies on them. This rich text approach is both the major strength and weakness of Apple Notes, at least now that iCloud syncing has become so reliable and fast. The Apple Notes share extension captures URLs in a form it calls rich links, which includes a thumbnail and text snippet to make captured links that much easier to recall. Apple Notes, for example, has some hard to overlook advantages – native integration means an unparalleled user experience when it comes to sharing material with the system-wide share extension on both the macOS and iOS. There are trade offs no matter which way you look at it. The real problem is not so much being torn between numerous different tools, but being torn between waiting on an old favourite to be reincarnated, so to speak, and moving on to something new. If you happened to have read any of the posts I have made about note-taking, you might think I have a problem.
#Mac notational velocity update
Update 10-01-2019: For an update on plain text note taking for macOS: Thoughtful Plain Text Note Taking with The Archive and Zettelkasten In Praise of Plain Text