I have exciting news!

You’ve been hearing from me for years about BitWriter, the nvALT replacement I was working on with David Halter. Well, I failed at my part, then we lost touch, and it never came to fruition. Now that my health is back to working state, I attempted to pick the project back up. Turned out David was MIA (hopefully ok), and the code I was left with no longer compiled on the latest operating systems. Seemed like it might be time to let go.

Then I heard from Fletcher Penney. You know, the guy who created MultiMarkdown, and who develops my favorite Markdown editor, MultiMarkdown Composer. He was working on a similar project and invited me to join him on it. Now we have an app nearing beta stage that’s better than any modal notes app you’ve used. Code name: nvUltra.

We need to wrap up some UI/UX work before we release the first round of betas, so I’m not ready to put an official ETA on it. But it’s close, and our goal is to start a beta test round in the next month or two. Sign up today for notifications, and the first round of beta testers will be taken from the email list. First in, first served.

This app works a lot like nvALT (and Notational Velocity, naturally). You pop it up and start typing. Search or create a note in seconds. It has blazing fast and accurate full-text search, the ability to find related notes based on content, and very complete Markdown editing tools (complete with syntax highlighting and theme editing). The biggest difference is that it works with multiple folders and sub-folders. You pick a folder, it indexes it, and you can use it just like nvALT. But then you can open another folder, or create a new one and start editing. It allows you to create folders anywhere, maybe one on Dropbox or iCloud Drive that’s shared, one on an encrypted disk that’s private, one for work, one for home, one for every writing project. You’re not limited to tags (though you can search by and sync with macOS tags within the app), and you can sort your notes into subfolders as well.

We don’t have an official name yet. We have some good ideas, but nothing that’s struck us both as “that’s it!” Have any suggestions? Feel free to brainstorm in the comments!

Sign up for the email list here and get notifications and beta access as they come out.