Obsidian as replacement for nvUltra

Knowledge management
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I use nvUltra (previously used Simple note) as a space to jot down notes/thoughts/links/etc, or like writing physical post-it notes. Its always in the background on my computer (and synced to a similar app for mobile), and I bring it in front with a keyboard shortcut. A blazingly fast way to “think with my hands”, without the need to think about organization. If the content is substantial for my research or work, I would put it in my respective Obsidian vault.

But this means I have separate environments for sort of the same process (nvUltra kinda does the same work as an Inbox inside Obsidian).

I would like to (try to) replace nvUltra with a dedicated Obsidian vault, that has a very minimalistic interface and structure. Has anyone done something like this and would like to share some thoughts for consideration/inspiration etc, before I do it? What themes and plugins would help in this regard?

I don’t want it to have any emphasis on organization (it’s irrelevant), but wouldn’t mind if there was some sort of latent structure that could be employed to evaluate and process the notes. I just don’t want that to be a distraction for when I just want to write something down quickly. (Ie. I don’t want a folder structure. It gets in the way. But I wouldn’t mind something like frontmatter tagging or similar, that could be employed if I want to (ie to help search for something in the future.)

I hope it resonates with someone, or maybe even a previous discussion. Any help/suggestions appreciated.

1 Like
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Hadn’t heard of nvUltra but following this post with interest.

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GitHub - mjessome/obsidian-global-hotkeys: Global hotkey support for Obsidian.md would be part of the solution.

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So it sounds like quick capture is the most important part for you?

I haven’t tried nvUltra. “nvAlt with images” was a huge wish for me several years ago. My favourite part of Notational Velocity and nvAlt was the blazingly fast fuzzy content search. That’s what I still miss in Obsidian. But I haven’t surveyed the latest plugins in a few months.

When I’m programming I use FZF in Neovim, and it’s an absolute joy. I’d love to be able to do a fzf search in my vault, and jump around as quickly as I can inside a project in Vim. Right now Omnisearch is pretty good. But for example, if I search “intestine”, I get an unordered list of results including “intestine”, “investing”, and “ingesting”. I never feel like I can quite zero in on what I’m searching for without a bit of friction.

(There are threads about search relevancy. But the display interface of the results is pretty key too, in my opinion.)

Quick capture isn’t very important for me. I do raise Obsidian app with a hotkey by using Hammerspoon in MacOS. I hit Caps-Z to quickly raise the app. And hotkeys for Unique Note Creator, or Daily Note. Or Cmd-N just dumps a new note in the root of my vault, which is my inbox. So speed of creation is never my bottleneck.

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I know this is an old thread, but…

At least on a Mac, using Raycast and the Obsidian plugin will let you do quick captures and appends - might help.