Any piece of text with value in my life gets dumped into nvALT. It is the best instantiation of an off-board brain I have. Type a few letters and all the notes with those letters appear. It is keyboard friendly software: If you’re ever not in the search field, just hit ESC, and you’ll land there. Open it and your cursor is already in the search field. My nvALT database is full of ten years of notes. It opens instantly and produces results instantly.

The fastest piece of text cataloging software I’ve used. Just a database of plain text files with a plain text editor bolted on. 1 It’s an oddly named, very bland application. One of my most used, most speedy pieces of software is nvALT. Fastness in software is like great margins in a book - makes you smile without necessarily knowing why. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. Like a good tool, it often means that it’s simple, but that’s not necessarily true. Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused. Software with minimal to no lag between wanting to activate or manipulate something and the thing happening. That is, software speedy both in function and interface.

Words with mod in them