nvnv

nvnv is a native, keyboard-first macOS notes app. A single field searches existing notes and creates a new note from an unmatched title when Return is pressed. Note filenames and UTF-8 text contents are authoritative; SQLite is a disposable search and state cache.

History and motivation

nvnv is a new implementation of Notational Velocity in Swift and Liquid Glass. I've been happy using the nvALT fork for a decade but it has not been updated for the Apple M series architecture and macOS informed me the app will stop working. This is my replacement.

How nvnv differs from Notational Velocity and nvALT

nvnv keeps the defining Notational Velocity interaction: one field filters notes as you type, opens a matching note, or creates a note from a new title.

• It is written in Swift 6 and SwiftUI, with a small AppKit text-editor bridge, instead of the original Objective-C and Cocoa implementation. It requires macOS 15 or newer.
• A note is always an individual UTF-8 plain-text file. Its filename stem is its title, while SQLite is only a rebuildable search and state cache. The older apps also support an application-managed database and other file formats.
• The selected notes folder is authoritative. nvnv watches for external changes, uses atomic writes and crash-recovery journals, presents edit conflicts, and prevents two processes from writing to a library at once.
• nvnv focuses on the local plain-text workflow. It does not include tags, wiki links, saved searches or bookmarks, encryption, a global activation shortcut, external-editor integration, rich-text or HTML storage, or Simplenote sync.
• It only has a vertical layout and no rendered markup preview.

Keyboard shortcuts

• ⌘L — focus the search/create field.
• Type — filter notes by title and contents.
• ↑ / ↓ — move through results while the search field is focused.
• ⌘J / ⌘K — select the next/previous note from anywhere.
• Return — open the selected or best title match; if none matches, create a note.
• Escape — clear the search or cancel a rename.
• ⌘D — deselect the note and restore the previous search.
• ⌘R — rename the selected note. Press Return to commit or Escape to cancel.
• ⌥⌘← — return to the previous note/search context.
• ⌘Delete — move the selected notes to Trash.
• ⇧⌘R — show the selected note in Finder.
• ⌘[ / ⌘] — outdent/indent.
• Tab / Shift-Tab — indent/outdent in the editor when “Tab indents text” is enabled.
• ⌘O — choose another notes folder.
• Standard macOS editing shortcuts work in the editor: ⌘Z, ⇧⌘Z, ⌘F, ⌘X, ⌘C, ⌘V, and ⌘A.

Build and run from source

Requires macOS 15 or newer and Xcode 26 / Swift 6.2 or newer.

./script/build_and_run.sh

The script builds the native Xcode app target, stages dist/nvnv.app, stops an older instance, and opens the new app bundle. It also supports --verify, --debug (which uses a debug-symbol build), --logs, and --telemetry. The Codex Run action is wired to this script.

Test

swift test --package-path Packages/NVNVCore
swift run --package-path Packages/NVNVCore nvnv-probes

The tests cover query semantics, Unicode matching, deterministic title selection, filename safety, UTF-8/BOM/CRLF scanning, symlink exclusion, compare-before-replace conflicts, cache rebuildability, and editor text transformations. The probe executable verifies FTS5 trigram support, atomic replacement, directory durability, and the OS-backed library lock.

Performance

Release-mode engine benchmarks use deterministic notes with 2,048-byte varied ASCII bodies. Unless noted otherwise, the figures below are medians of seven runs after one warm-up. They were measured in July 2026 on a 10-core Apple M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64 GB RAM, running macOS 26.5.2.

Workload	Result
Build normalized search documents for 10,000 notes	345 ms
Search 10,000 cached notes, all notes matching	13 ms
Search 10,000 cached notes, no notes matching	12 ms
Selective FTS search across 10,000 notes, one match	1.8 ms
Update one note in SQLite and the FTS index	12.5 ms
Initial filesystem scan of 10,000 notes	2.23 s
Warm metadata scan of 10,000 unchanged notes	438 ms
Scan one externally changed file in a 10,000-note library	16 ms
Search 50,000 cached notes, no notes matching	63 ms

The initial scan is a single-run setup measurement; steady-state rows use the seven-sample method above.

These are core search, indexing, and filesystem measurements; they do not include SwiftUI list rendering or complete application-launch latency. The load test also identifies a current bottleneck: constructing the complete SQLite trigram index for 10,000 × 2 KB notes takes about 27 seconds. Cache construction is therefore not represented by the steady-state search figures above.

Run the same benchmark locally with:

swift run -c release --package-path Packages/NVNVCore nvnv-probes --benchmark

Documentation

The full product behavior is defined in the nvnv SPEC. Architecture decisions are recorded in docs/architecture. Release history is recorded in the changelog. The signing, notarization, and publishing process is in the release runbook.

License

nvnv is available under the MIT License.