Cutting back on using Notational Velocity

March 27, 2026

Consider this as follow up to my post, Too many notes, and not as a rememberance to the once fabulous macOS software Notational Velocity. Anyone who is using it is likely using the successor nvALT (I’m running version 2.2.8). It’s not that suddenly the software has stopped working if you are still using it on an older computer, but rather you may encounter random issues. For example, I moved the folder where nvALT reads from and was unable to access any notes until I deleted the plist file associated with nvALT. Not a great experience. Then again most people don’t move their notes folder around.

What I come to lament is not the demise of either app itself, but rather the paradigm of note taking with a single folder full of plain text files. Is this a good long term method for note taking? The oldest note I have in my note folder is from July 2011. For almost 15 years it continues to just work. But is it the best? Does it still work for me? Not really. There is no regular system for review. Editing the file is fast, but the attributes of a file such as creation date and modified date not able to be referenced or reused (compared to in a wiki context). No fields or tags and even if there were, they would not be cross platform.

Today I have 878 files with a total word count of 58,003. Something on the magnitude length of a small novel. I’ve already written about how I use TiddlyWiki and I am shifting many of my notes into one of the several TiddlyWikis I use. What keeps surfacing in my mind time and time again is this idea from Jethro Kuan

The primary purpose of note-taking should not be for storing ideas, but for developing them. When we take notes, we should ask: “In what context do I want to see this note again?”

Our minds work based on association, so it should be obvious we need to consider context when taking notes. The raw text files in Notational Velocity are rather unstructured. They don’t have much context much interconnection except on the explicit nature of the name of the note. They are often fragments not yet part of a larger context. This is why seeing a giant folder of notes is somewhat anxiety inducing because there could be ideas in there not yet unearthed. In reality though, there’s always the option of simply starting over.

Joan Westenberg deleted their second brain and also has a video on it. Their step to delete their entire idea folder in a remarkable act of moving on and I think I’m starting to understand why they would do this. You end up holding onto the past in a sense because during your searches you will stumble upon your old thoughts, things you abandoned for one reason or another and those fragments of your past can often feel somewhat depressing. The lesson here is to be much more ruthless with archiving notes and fragments instead of holding onto them. For example if I have an idea for a blog post I might write something that would resemble a draft, but I don’t leave it in my drafts folder forever. if the idea doesn’t result in a post I want to publish, I toss it to the side. You move on again and again and trust that if an idea is truly worth your attention, it will resurface itself again.