Hypsometry. Modal Synthesis.

For a few years now I’ve been using Notational Velocity for, well, for just about everything. As its author, Zachary Schneirov, puts it:

While there are many, many note-taking programs for Mac OS X, Notational Velocity is the only one that actually operates in a useful manner.

It’s as simple as it possibly could be, and all the more powerful for that. All you do is write notes and search for text, and there’s one interface to perform both those functions.

The components are simple: There are notes, and each note consists of a title and some body text. (Completely plain text.) And you can see a list of your notes, in which each entry shows both the title and the beginning of the body text. And there’s a search bar, which is the most powerful part.

For instance, I keep my todo list in a note called “today”. To get to that note, I start typing “today” into the search bar. The search bar autocompletes (in a soft, unobtrusive manner, unlike iTunes, for instance) what I’m typing. At the same time, a list of all notes containing (in either their titles or their bodies) whatever I’ve typed so far. By the time I’ve typed “to”, the note titled “today” has been selected for me. In addition, I can see all the other notes I’ve created that contain “to”, such as a note that contains the address of a friend in Washington, a note that contains my serial number for Toast, a bunch of notes with my full name Christopher, and so on.

So that’s simple enough. I just select the note I want from the list, tab into the main text editing area, and do whatever I need to do.

One entry in my current todo list is “call Fernwood”. If I type “fernwood” into the search bar, the list of notes narrows down to just one: “today”, where I’ve reminded myself to make a camping reservation for a folkYEAHshow. But because there’s no note with the title “fernwood”, Notational Velocity only shows me that note in the list; it doesn’t select it. If I tab into the text entry field, then the application will automatically create a new note for me, with the title “fernwood”, where I can enter my reservation information.

In other words, the search bar tries to find what you’re looking for, but if it can’t, it assumes that you’re creating something new. Simple as could be.

Notational Velocity has a bit of a cult following. I think I first read about it on 43 Folders, back in 2004. Unfortunately, Schneirov stopped updating the application as of version 1.1.1, which was sometime back in 2005. Which means that there’s no Intel version available, which means that it’s dying a slow death.

Last summer PJ Hyett created a Rails version of the application for the web, called vJot. (And released it as open source.) vJot’s slick, but a web application doesn’t really fit into the same slot in my workflow as Notational Velocity. So it looks like I’m stuck with it, slowness and proprietary database format and all.

Today I just figured out how to speed it up, in one crucial regard. Notational Velocity allows you to set a hot key that will bring the application to the front. For some reason, this has revealed itself to be one of the application’s worst performance bottlenecks. After a year and a half of being annoyed by the delay of bringing to the front, it finally occurred to me to trigger it using Quicksilver. (Yes, my other favorite application which is essential to my workflow and whose development has also stopped.) Quicksilver, it seems, is much faster at revealing Notational Velocity than Notational Velocity itself.

Simple enough to do: Go into Notational Velocity and set the hot key to some combination that I’ll never press, then go into Quicksilver and create a new trigger that opens Notational Velocity when I press command-option-space.

Oh, and even if you don’t care about anything I’ve said here, go over to the Notational Velocity site anyway, just to check out the brilliant photographs. Please.