nvALT

I’ve been missing taking notes. GTD practitioners will tell you that one of the healthiest things you can do to remove stress is to use an “external” system to capture all your thoughts and goals.

For a long time I’ve used things like OmniFocus to have very serious todo lists. I like todos but find that a lot of the things that I need to do aren’t IRL stuff: it’s things like bugs, software updates, etc. For that, I use GitHub Issues. However, I still have a huge amount of information sitting around in my brain that is useless 90% but can be referred to later.

Enter nvALT. nvALT is a fork of Notational Velocity, a pretty killer note-taking app. The motivations of the app are explained on NV’s site:

NOTATIONAL VELOCITY is an application that stores and retrieves notes. It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist.

While the explanation may be a bit pedantic, the motivation is pretty clear when you use the app. Taking notes is fast - there’s rarely any need for the mouse, and it writes in exclusively plain text. Retrieving notes is fast - the only pieces of interface are the note text area, a list of notes, and a search bar. There’s no cruft in the interface, and day-to-day (or even minute-to-minute) usage benefits from it.

nvALT is an updated version of the app, as the original is somewhat abandoned. Some of the changes to nvALT:

• Markdown support
• Preview functionality
• Auto-pairing brackets, etc.

It’s actually not a huge list of changes - the original app was good on its own, but I’d rather use something that is supported. Additionally, both apps are open source: one of the first things I did in OSS programming was to fork the nvALT source and create a native full-screen mode for myself.

I’ve been using nvALT again the last week or so and have been really enjoying it. I used it years ago, but only for small numbers of notes and things that weren’t super useful or worth remembering. My approach this time around is to write down everything: I have reference cards for projects I’m working on, events I’m going to (including transit), people I know (contact forms, times we’ve met, etc.) and things that may not necessarily have immediate use, but are worth retaining. Because they aren’t in my head and they’re on an external system, I can fill them with a lot of information at no real loss. Additionally, they’re synced on Dropbox as .md files so I feel like they’re pretty secure and negligible in disk usage (currently at 27kb).

I’ve also begun to use the linking functionality more: both between notes and actual files. For example, a budget calculation can link to an external Soulver file that is in the same directory. A journal entry of my day can easily refer to the actual project notes, instead of just naming the project.

There’s a lot of additional things people are doing with nvALT to be even faster: these posts by A Better Mess and Caleb McDaniel have some inspired workflows that are in no small part due to the patron saint of nvALT, Merlin Mann. I don’t think I’m at the point where I have enough notes in the system to use these effectively, but I’m staying aware of them and as the note count bubbles up, it should become pretty useful.