Notational Velocity is one of my favorites apps for the Mac: it’s a minimal and focused writing application that enables you to entirely navigate between notes using the keyboard, it integrates with Simplenote and can store its plain text files anywhere on your computer - Dropbox folder included. It autosaves notes so that you don’t have to worry about losing anything. Also, you just have to press Enter to create a new note. It’s simple and powerful at the same time. It’s free and open source.
Its open-source nature gave birth to a plethora of “forks”, alternative versions of the software with custom modifications and features. Maybe you remember Steven Frank’s excellent Markdown fork. Today’s mod comes from Elastic Threads: it’s the Notational Velocity you’re used to, only with horizontal layout and fullscreen mode enabled.
Admittedly, the horizontal view was “inspired” by the iPad, but it was necessary for bringing fullscreen mode to Notational. If you’re used to sidebars and keyboard navigation, you’ll feel right at home with this version: use up and down to navigate on the left, check out the note in the right panel. I like Notational’s default view, but I like this better. It feels more Mac-like and it’s absolutely great on the iMac. I look forward to testing this on the MacBook as well. You can switch between default and horizontal views with CMD + 1, and hide the notes list with CMD + Shift + C.
Why would you want to hide the notes list? For the fullscreen mode: if you’ve always loved Writeroom’s focused writing environment but can’t leave Notational, this is a dream come true. It’s just a white background and text. Do I need to say more?
Elastic Thread’s fork of Notational Velocity also contains a menubar mode that lets you show an icon in the menubar, and optionally hide the one in the Dock. I’m not a big fan of menubar-only apps, so I’m gonna pass on this. Everything else is just Notational Velocity, and works just like you expect. Read the author’s post about the fork here, and go download.
