Notational Velocity and nvALT, classic macOS note-taking apps, are back

Back when I used Windows, over ten years ago, I had a serious case of Mac envy, all because of Notational Velocity, a lightning-fast note-taking app.

Its signature look, with the list of notes at the top and the selected note’s text below, came with full keyboard control and a global shortcut to start a new note. Under the hood, everything was saved as plain text files (*.txt or similar). People loved it!

I wanted that app so badly that one day I described it on my personal blog, hoping some developer would take up the project. And it worked! Alison Robson wrote Notation (pt_BR), a near-perfect native port of Notational Velocity to Windows. It served me well for as long as I stayed on Windows, which turned out to be just over a year.

Ours wasn’t the only app of its kind to fade into obscurity. Our inspiration and nvALT, the best-known fork of Notational Velocity, with a few tweaks of its own, also stopped getting updates. The rise of modern alternatives like Obsidian and Joplin spared their users from having to mourn them.

So I was somewhat surprised to find out that both Notational Velocity and nvALT have come back to life in the past few weeks, after a ten-year hiatus. The new versions bring the apps to Apple silicon, update their dependencies and… well, work exactly the way they used to.

Brett Terpstra, nvALT’s developer, has been promising a new app along the same lines, nvUltra, for a handful of years now. In his announcement of nvALT’s resurrection, he describes the work as a stopgap until nvUltra is out of beta.

Meanwhile, the repository for Notational Velocity, the brainchild of Zachary Schneirov, has only two releases, both published two weeks ago.

I wonder whether there’s still room for these old-school editors in today’s landscape. Obsidian, with its plugin ecosystem and its “vaults” approach, has won over a lot of people who work with plain text and, crucially these days, offers a mobile app and plenty of ways to sync your notes.

Even I, who get by with TextEdit (the Mac’s answer to Notepad), am not sold on switching, though I can see some upsides, like decluttering my desktop, which is currently overrun with *.txt files.

Either way, the apps are out there, now compatible with recent versions of macOS. If you’ve missed them, or if you’re new and curious about the habits of “productivity” buffs from decades past, they’re worth a look. Both are free and open source.