Productivity Sauce

Notational Velocity is arguably one of the best open source note-taking applications. Sadly, it's available only on Mac OS X. But despair not: nvPY provides a viable alternative to Notational Velocity for Linux users. nvPY is not the prettiest application out there, but its interface is functional and it offers several useful creature comforts. The application sports a global search feature which lets you quickly find notes containing a specific search string. nvPY can handle Markdown and RST formatting, and you can convert formatted notes to the HTML format. Most users will also appreciate the built-in word count feature. nvPY also allows you to create internal links to other notes using the [[note]] format. More importantly, nvPY supports syncing via the Simplenote service.

Installing nvPY on Debian and Ubuntu (as well as their derivatives) can be done by running two commands as root:

apt-get install python python-tk python-pip python-markdown
pip install nvpy

The first command installs the required dependencies, while the second command installs nvPY. Before you launch nvPY, you should create a file called .nvpy.cfg in your home directory containing your Simplenote credentials:

[nvpy]
sn_username = simplenote_username
sn_password = simplenote_password

Once you've done that, launch nvPY, perform sync using the File | Sync full command, and you are good to go.

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