Notational Velocity on OS X Mavericks
The Linkdump No 74 on 82MHz had a nice introduction to the blogpost Getting Ready for the Winter. Part 1, Switching Technology on the blog Minutes To Midnight by Simone Silvestroni.
In this great blogpost Simone describes several reasons to switch to OS X Mavericks and writes about favorite software recently installed on it.
Simone also points to Mavericks Forever, a wonderful website with a lot of useful tips and links for running OS X Mavericks in 2025.
I sometimes play with an old MacBook Air from 2013, running OS X Mavericks.
Inspired by Simone's post, I went to Macintosh Garden and to Macintosh Repository to find some additional software that I might like.
Notational Velocity
I stumbled upon the old version 2.0 β5 of Notational Velocity.
I have never used Notational Velocity, but I remember that several years ago a lot of people posting about being disappointed that they no longer could run it after upgrading their OS X.
In the past I have used Deft for Emacs, an Emacs mode for quickly browsing, filtering, and editing directories of plain text notes. According to the developer, Deft is inspired by Notational Velocity.
Notational Velocity can be used without a mouse, completely keyboard-driven.
Just start typing the title of a note. During typing Notational Velocity performs a incremental search for notes. It searches both in the title as well as in the body of the notes.
- To create a new note, just type the title, followed by the Enter-key.
- Otherwise, select a note from the list with search results using the up and down keys, or the mouse, and activate with the Enter-key.
- Changes are automatically saved, there is no save-button.
- To create a link to another note, just type the title within double square brackets. Follow a link with Command-Enter or by a mouse click.
Notational Velocity comes with four notes pre-installed, in one of them you'll find a list of useful key bindings.
Some useful settings:
- In Preferences: Store and read notes as plain text files (under "storage") will create text files. This way you can always use them with some other piece of software.
- In View: Switch to vertical layout. This will give a two column layout, the left column shows the search results/list of notes, and the right column the body of the active note.
Notational Velocity does what it says on the tin: it is fast and efficient to use. It is not Emacs, but just like Emacs it can be used completely keyboard driven.
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