Obsidian as Notational Velocity

I used to take a lot of notes at work. I had a pretty good system.

Back in the olden days when I was a software developer, I kept my personal notes in Kate, the KDE text editor, and when I got a Mac, I moved over to Simple Note and then Notational Velocity.

It was incredibly simple – you wanted to note something? Start typing – if it exists, add to that note. If not, create a new note.

I’ve enjoyed tinkering with various note-taking systems over the years, from org-mode to Logseq and many in between. Now I’m playing with Obsidian and I think I’ve got it working like Notational Velocity:

• Install the Omnisearch plugin from the community plugin store
• Delete keybindings for New Note (CMD+n) and Create Note on the Right (CMD+SHIFT+n)
• Map CMD+N to Omnisearch Vault
  • and I also use CMD+P for it as well (like how VS Code does it, the command pallet is mapped to CMD+SHIFT+P)

Now when I want to find a note, press CMD+n or CMD+p and start typing. If I typed “Notational Velocity” it finds this note and I’m ready to start editing it. If it doesn’t exist, Shift+Return creates a new note.

And it works pretty well syncing with my phone, so that’s nice.

So far, so good. 🤞