I built a native macOS notes app for search-first, plain-text people
For anyone hunting an nvALT / Notational Velocity–style workflow—without Electron, and with one IDE trick I missed.
I’ve been shipping vnotes (velocity notes) with a very specific taste in mind: the clarity of Sublime, the speed and “type-to-find” rhythm of nvALT, and one habit I couldn’t give up from IntelliJ—running a command from the document with a shortcut, then seeing the result right there.
Heads-up: what’s out today is a technical preview, not a polished v1.0.0 yet. The core loop works and I’m dogfooding it daily, but I’m still weighing a few more features and hardening passes before I’d call it a “1.0” release. If you try it, think early adopter feedback welcome, not “final product manifesto.”
Here’s what actually shipped so far.
1. Plain text on disk — Notes are .txt in a folder you pick. No lock-in, no mystery database. Sync and backup stay simple.
2. Search-first — The UI is built around search: match title or contents, jump in, or create when the title doesn’t exist yet. That’s the nvALT-shaped muscle memory I wanted.
3. Markdown subset + fenced code — I’m not chasing a heavy preview stack (speed first). The editor highlights a deliberate Markdown subset and colors fenced code blocks so snippets stay readable.
4. Welcome notes from the repo — Default onboarding lives in template files in the project, copied into the app on build, with incremental seeding when templates change—so the app doesn’t drown in hardcoded strings in C++.
5. Terminal-in-notes, on purpose and bounded — Inside a bash markdown code-block runs a small allowlist (ping, curl, echo) with limits; output lands in an output markdown codeblock too. It’s not “run anything”—it’s useful without pretending to be a secure shell.
If you’re the kind of person who searches for an nvALT alternative and cares about native feel + honest files, this is the lane I’m building in: Sublime-clean, nv-fast, IntelliJ-practical—without turning notes into a browser.
If this sounds like your kind of tool: grab the build for free, use it on real work, and tell me what you think—especially if you’re coming from nvALT / Notational Velocity and miss that speed. I’m still shaping the roadmap, and the best input is “this clicked” / “this annoyed me.”