I reached out to Christian Tietze earlier this year to review his other app, the markdown table generator, Table Flip. I believe The Archive has taken over the mantle of best plain text notes app on macOS. Now it seems, despite the affection I still hold for nvALT, there is finally a better option available for markdown notes. It should be clear why I claimed nvALT was still the best plain text notes solution. Put my discomfort at playing hide and seek with my data against the future proof and flexible plain text notes of nvALT. In a strange sort of way, it means more data tied up inside the Apple leviathan. 2 Nonetheless, the result is data that remains for all practical purposes beholden to those apps, in need of processing if you want to access it elsewhere. 1 Where iOS is involved, CloudKit sync makes sense for these apps, especially given Apple’s mobile file system remains so half-arsed and piecemeal. Even the excellent note taking utility Drafts - which will soon be available on macOS - ties notes up in a database of sorts. By using a database to store notes, Bear is an ostensibly plain text notes app that ultimately obscures its data.īear is not alone in that of course, the same is true of other popular Markdown and writing apps, like Ulysses.

Moreover, it is built upon a significant design decision that counts against it. At the same time, it is kind of cutesy and opinionated. Easily one of the best notes apps, perhaps even one of the better markdown editors for writing. It is delightfully designed, aesthetically pleasing, and feature rich. Fewer still that support features to make them noteworthy for academic work. There are very few native apps for macOS that leave notes unmolested in the file system. Note takers have never had so many apps to choose from, but nvALT still has significant advantages over most plain text note taking apps to come after it. I’d wager the popularity owes much to a lack of alternatives. One of the most read posts on this site is a brief note praising Brett Terpstra’s wonderfully robust plain text notes app, nvALT.

Nvalt markdown only