nvALT is my favorite MarkDown writing app

I love Plain Text and Markdown[1]. It’s universal, works on any device, any operating system, and it’s easily formatted with Markdown. You can write in any text editor everywhere.

nvALT for Mac is one of my favorites, and it’s even free. It makes it so easy to write plain text notes formatted in Markdown if you want.

It syncs with Dropbox or Simplenote so that you can write everywhere and still be in total sync.

In nvALT you can easily drag and drop web pages, and they get converted to Markdown automatically. An easy way to store web pages.

By writing your plain text using Markdown you can format a complete blog post that you very easily can copy as HTML and paste into your blog. To me, that is the best way blogging.

In nvALT it is very easy and fast to search for notes too, just type the first letters in what you are looking for and nvALT filters the note list after what you searching for. If the note you are looking for doesn’t exist, just hit enter and create it. That is a very fast way creating notes. You can actually use nvALT as a simpler Evernote, but a lot more universal and open. The files you create is plain text so they are future proof so you don’t have to be afraid of the app you are suing will stop working. Just start using another app. Plain Text file format is 100% future proof.

And all your plain text notes syncs with Dropbox, so it is very easy to create notes in Draft on Android for example, or ByWord on iOS, and all notes is synchronized with nvALT. So you can start working on some text on your Android phone, and keep working on it on your Mac.

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


  1. Markdown is a lightweight markup language, originally created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz allowing people “to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)”. See more posts tagged MarkDown.  ↩

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