“do not research simply to decorate your writing with impressive names and references. Research should extend your thinking, not replace it.” — Alexis McElroy, The Muse & The Melody, How to Turn Your Thoughts Into Something Worth Reading. Substack
nvALT is back from the dead?
Surprising news that Brett Terpstra has resurrected the venerable note making app nvALT. Yes indeed, nvALT is back from the dead.
True, we’ve been waiting what seems like centuries for the long-promised, upgraded and massively improved version, nvULTRA to appear, but since it isn’t yet available, at least now there’s an interim solution, a revamped nvALT.
I expect almost everyone who might need a simple note-making app that plays nicely with Markdown files has already long since moved on to other options, such as any one of many text editors, or MarkEdit on the Mac, or nvENVY, or The Archive or Zettlr, or Obsidian or Bear — or you name it.
Still, it’s nice to see nvALT, the (almost) original and (possibly) the best, back in action. Maybe it’ll also encourage a few people to check out Brett Terpstra’s app Marked3, which for anyone working with Markdown files is rather useful. It’s billed as a ‘Markdown preview’ app but it does a whole lot more than that, including things I didn’t know were possible1. And I can confirm that the latest release of nvALT works well with Marked’s ‘streaming preview’ feature.
A while ago, Christian of zettelkasten.de produced a handy guide for using nvALt as a Zettel note archive, though the specialised Zettelkasten apps, The Archive and Zettlr add features that some fans of this approach to making notes may well find indispensable. But since life is complicated enough as it is, I’m an advocate of using the simplest tools you can get away with for A minimal approach to writing notes, and nvALT is useful, fast and simple.
And talking of simplicity and of the (almost) original, the real OG, the venerable Notational Velocity, has been receiving updates recently too, after a long dormancy. It seems to have come back to life with a new release after a remarkable fifteen year gap.
Interesting that these note-making apps still seem useful and relevant after all these years. And hold onto your hat: for the long-awaited nvUltra release, apparently Brett is ‘shooting for 2026 still’.
Now read:
- Enhanced markdown apps you can use for free to make effective notes.
- So many note-taking apps in the app graveyard - but not all are zombies.
- A minimal approach to writing notes.
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Just now I discovered Marked3 will verify your hyperlinks for you and can even do so automatically. ↩︎
I really like writing while on a train journey, and this article about a crazy train trip project in Japan is inspiring. Japan Today.
#WritingLife #Japan #productivity
💬 “I still think the real revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.” – Rebecca Solnit
Via Bradley Andrews
💬 “Cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.” — Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 89.3. Cited by Michel de Montagne in ‘On Experience’ in The Essays: A Selection. Trans. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 2004. 3.13, 366.
This is true, potentially, of writing notes. It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge.
The solution? Link your notes and create hub or structure notes (there is a difference — see Bob Doto’s post for details) that cluster separate ideas together and lead in useful directions.
📷 In Brittany, France, there’s an area they call ‘La Côte du Granit Rose’ – the Pink Granite Coast. I was happy to find a corner of the New South Wales coast that’s really quite like it.
Birubi Point at Anna Bay, NSW.
📷 I’ve taken a few days out to walk the coast. It was… well, you can see for yourself what it was. This might explain why my writing here has been even slower than usual. But now I’m back, and normal service will resume shortly.
In Matt Bell’s excellent book on writing, Refuse to be Done, there’s a quote by Karen Russell, author of the excellent novels Swamplandia. and The Antidote. She says,
💬 “Writing a novel is kind of like scaling Mt. Everest and passing by your own bones on the way.”
Respect is due, but I can’t help feeling it might not be quite that hard.
#writing #climbing #writinglife
💬 “We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people’ by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the ’truth’ of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations… I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.” – Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House. (1969). p. 80.
Still true 😞
