I have used many note taking apps in the past and lately settled on Notational Velocity (NV) on a Mac. I have been using it for the past year or so and I LOVE IT!
From the Notational velocity (NV) website...
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.
website link: https://notational.net
Some key features:
- search is the main aspect of the app interface and is super simple and fast
- all notes content is 'encrypted'
- no 'save' button; all notes get auto saved automatically
- it is Open Source!
You can create as many notes as you want. NV documentation says that the best way to use it is to create many notes vs having one note with a lot of text. NV says that it excels when the content is distributed. With my experience, I can relate to it and confirm that it works great to go through my hundreds of notes.
Notational Velocity is pretty lightweight and has a very simple easy to use interface. The search is super fast and the highlighting of matching text makes it easy to look for/enter notes. The keyboard navigation is useful with its 'excruciatingly' simple shortcuts!
It does not offer fancy formatting features such as underlines, font size, font color/background color, font type etc. But, offers bold, italic, and strikethrough of the notes text. I have built my own system of using markdown tags, hashtags and identifiers to enter and search for notes. So, not having fancy formatting is not limiting at all. It has very useful feature to include "links" (hyperlinks) between notes within NV.
I have used many tools such as VI editor within terminal (with grep and sed features), Notepad, Evernote, Simplenote, etc. I use NV locally on my Mac and do not use any synching with Dropbox or other cloud services. But, that feature is there for you to explore.
In short, if you are looking for a powerful yet easy-to-use low-friction note taking native app, then check out Notational Velocity. You won't regret it.
A screenshot of the app with a list of keyboard shortcuts:
Top comments (7)
I have researched and used too many note taking apps and none of them were really suitable for me, except for craft. Their UI could use a bit of more work and could add a bit more features, but is a great note-taking app overall.
It syncs with all of your devices and the way it is able to creatively organize all of your information is just amazing.
Website: craft.do
Set aside this, I might just build my own note-taking app later.
@monish_munagala did not come across craft before. but, looks like it has a lot of nice features.
do you use it as a native Mac app? my primary requirement for note taking is to use it as a native app (offers me offline flexibility)
yes, good luck with your own future note building app efforts!
@monish_munagala did not come across craft before. but, looks like it has a lot a of nice features.
do you use it as a native Mac app? my primary requirement for note taking is to use it as a native app (offliners me offline flexibility)
yes, good luck with your own future note building app efforts!
@akaak Unfortunately, craft is not a native Mac app. I had to go to their website and download the Mac version of the application.
I hope their website in prettier than their website 😝
Joke aside, I am personally quite fond of typora. It is paid now, but only a <30$ one time fee. It is a WYSIWYG Markodwn (no preview vs render panes) that supports search (you can open a folder), has many themes, latex support and the export to pdf looks great. Fast and so easy to use.
I use it with a folder that I store on Google drive (or my work drive, for privacy) .
typora.io/
@derlin - yes, NV website could use some work in promoting their app ;) For an open source project/app, it is a very good product. I personally like the simplicity of it and did not need fancy features.
typora.io looks pretty cool. the fact that it has markdown and live rendering in a distraction-free view is great. I might give it a try. thanks for the suggestion.
Another app/tool FSNotes is more like Notational Velocity (NV). I did not try it yet.
"FSNotes is modern notes manager for macOS and iOS. App respects open formats like GitHub Flavored Markdown, so you can easily write documents on iPhone and MacBook. It's simple and blazing fast!"
website: fsnot.es
I would like to know any Notational Velocity users that tried FSNotes to comment on their experience.