nvALT is good software. Its a simple note taking app, a fork of Notational Velocity. The key thing is it is very simple. You have a bunch of text notes in a bag. You edit one note at a time. Notes can be stored as text files in Dropbox. It autosaves as you type and has a simple navigation search UI. That’s about it.

I’ve tried a bunch of note taking solutions. Either they’re too simple and unstructured (like a simple text file) or they have too many features with a busy UI (like Evernote). nvALT is just about the right level of complexity. I use it mostly to track projects. One note per project, like “blog about nvALT”. Tagged with category (“blog”, “code”) and a numeric priority. I also have a top level Tasks that I prepend the day’s action items to.

nvALT includes a MultiMarkdown formatter with live preview that is useful enough to, say, write blog posts in. What I really wish it had was a simple WYSIWYG editor with HTML output. For some reason there still is no good simple visual editor in the world that spits out clean simple HTML.

techgood
13 years ago   2012-02-20 19:47 Z