Note creation: does it take many clicks or keystrokes to create a new Zettel note?.Note retrieval: for example, how fast and easy is full-text search?.This is how the app looks on first start Testing nvALT: the Four CriteriaĪs a reminder, the key elements I look at will be: I recommend you follow his setup steps to use a directory of plain text files instead of an arbitrary database.Īlso, I suggest you put this note archive directory into your Dropbox folder so you can access your notes from other devices. See Michael Schechter’s nvALT 101 for a general introduction and configuration tips. You can customize the font, colors, and even the width of the text area so you can use the application in full-screen mode on widescreen displays comfortably. Initially, the app is in portrait mode, with a smallish font and a few example notes. the contents of a selected note, which is a text field you can write in to.the list of notes, filtered according to the search term,.Looking at the picture above, nvALT has three elements I will refer to: Enter nvALT nvALT as it looks on my machine ![]() This app is Mac only, sadly, but there are alternative implementations popping up which promise to work on every platform. I mean, really, a LOT, as in 3000 and counting. I use nvALT since 2010, and I think it’s the best product available to create and find notes quickly and to manage a lot of them. It’s Open Source, free, and very popular. nvALT is a fork by Brett Terpstra and David Halter of the original Notational Velocity, which was created by Zachary Schneirov, and a few modifications by yours truly. While most things apply to the Notational Velocity base application, I will talk about nvALT exclusively in this review. Confluence (not bad, but lacks structured data and seems to be focused on serving smaller teams vs.I want to start this series of reviews with a software I’m fairly familiar with. SharePoint (this is so bad it pains me to mention it) When you add the ability to store and reuse structured data (Cargo or Semantic MediaWiki) it really becomes powerful. It hits all the OPs requests for searchable, code snippets (with syntax highlighting), and hyperlinking. The upside is that once you do, it becomes an incredibly powerful tool that most users adopt without complaint. The downside is that to get it running with a good set of extensions that optimizes it for enterprise use takes a bit of an effort. I've never used Quip in a real work setting. If Drive added a markdown editor like Dropbox Paper I'd probably push to switch the search is pretty great, its a platform we already have, and you get a full, amazing document editor for those documents where it makes sense. The inability to easily write technical documentation with inline/block code makes it a non-starter. And given that Confluence can handle both pretty well, there's not a great argument for adopting a new service from an entirely different company we don't otherwise use. We also used Dropbox Paper for a while I really like it, but its primarily useful for, let's call them "transactional" documentation (write, get feedback, never look at again) It's not very good at being a Wiki, storing long-term long-form information. Which, we did for a while, and it works fine, but in its simplicity it misses some of the key features that I do like about Confluence (like those automated index pages and page comments). There's almost no advantage to using them over just storing markdown in the repository. Overall, I haven't found anything better, and I write a lot of technical documentation for our company. You can set up tables which can automatically pull summary lines of any other page labeled with a specific label, which is great for automatically building indexes or tables of content. You can organize your company workspaces however you'd like. Like any Atlassian product, you can script it to do basically whatever you want. The formatting gets in your way more than markdown, but at least not as much as something like OneNote.īut, it's powerful. ![]() It's riddled with bugs (just the other day my spacebar literally stopped working in their edit view). It's unbearable on slow or spotty internet connections. Which is pretty much the best way to describe all Atlassian products.
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