A collaboration between Brett Terpstra (ttscoff) and David Halter (ElasticThreads) based on DivineDominion's fork. nvALT adds a few features we'd been looking for (and let me get some coding practice).
nvALT is a fork of the original Notational Velocity with some additional features and some interface modifications. It is a work in progress. I'm not listing it as a beta, as that would imply that it was on its way to being its own product. It's an experiment, and I hope you enjoy it!
Notational Velocity is a way to take notes quickly and effortlessly using just your keyboard. You press a shortcut to bring up the window and just start typing. It will begin searching existing notes, filtering them as you type. You can use ⌘-J and ⌘-K to move through the list. Enter selects and begins editing. If you're creating a new note, you just type a unique title and press enter to move the cursor into a blank edit area. Check out the descriptions at notational.net for a more eloquent synopsis.
nvALT adds:
- Widescreen (horizontal) layout option
- Shortcut (⌘-⌥-N) to collapse the notes panel
- Markdown, Textile and MultiMarkdown support with Preview window
- HTML source code tab in the Preview window for fast copy/paste to blogs, etc.
- Unique interface design changes
- Fixes for a couple of bugs/annoyances
- Customizable HTML and CSS files for the Preview window
- You can use Javascript in the templates to do a few neat tricks
- Editor and preview themes, including MultiMarkdown Composer themes and Marked CSS
Select "Open Custom CSS Folder" within the Preview menu, and the application's supprt folder will open. You will find two files: template.html and custom.css. If you're handy with HTML and CSS, feel free to customize these in whatever way you like. You can add Javascript as well, but you'll need to load external scripts from a url or using a full file:// path. If worse comes to worst, you can just delete or rename your customizations and the default files will be put back in place automatically when you select the menu item again.
Those files are the Default preview. A preview theme, below, replaces them for that preview.
Themes are chosen in Settings → Fonts & Colors. There is a menu for the editor and a menu for the preview, plus Import… and Open Themes Folder.
Default leaves the note editor and the notes list on the current color scheme, and the preview on template.html / custom.css. Pick a named theme to override that. An editor theme restyles the note editor (background, text, caret, selection, and Markdown syntax colors) and the notes list. List colors come from the theme's tableView, tableViewHighlighted, and tableViewInactive keys, then from the theme's window background and foreground. The note body keeps the textView colors when those differ.
Themes are stored in:
~/Library/Application Support/nvALT/Themes
Open Themes Folder reveals that folder. Drop files in it and they show up in the menus. Import… copies selected files into the same folder. The first time themes are used, a sample Paper editor theme and Paper preview theme are copied in. They are not selected for you.
Editor themes are MultiMarkdown Composer themes. nvALT reads .theme files (JSON), plus .plist and .json files that use the same keys: textView colors, caretColor, selectionBackgroundColor, list colors (tableView, tableViewHighlighted, tableViewInactive), and syntax styles such as heading, strong, emphasis, codeBlock, codeSpan, blockquote, markup, and linkParens. A Composer theme can be imported as-is.
With no editor theme, the title bar, the divider, and the scrollbars use the system window color, so they follow light and dark mode. An editor theme's window backgroundColor (the color at the top of the theme, outside textView) colors that same chrome. The scrollbar knob uses the window foregroundColor when that color stays visible against it.
Preview themes are CSS files (.css). The note is wrapped in <div id="wrapper">, so a Marked theme can be dropped in and used directly. Style #wrapper and the elements inside it.
nvalt:// and nv:// can install a theme from a file or a web address. Percent-encode the url value:
nvalt://add-theme?url=file%3A%2F%2F%2FUsers%2Fme%2FDesktop%2FSvelte.theme
nv://add-theme?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2FPaper.css
A local path works without encoding the whole URL:
nvalt://add-theme?path=/Users/me/Desktop/Svelte.theme
The file is copied into the themes folder and selected. Accepted files are .theme, .plist, .json, and .css.
More info and a download for the compiled binary can be found at brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt
- Notational Velocity
- Code: The original Notational Velocity source code by Zachary Schneirov
- Code: DivineDominion's MultiMarkdown fork
- Inspiration: Elastic Threads' version of Notational Velocity