Monday, October 24, 2011

Running Two Notational Velocities at Once


Do this:
  1. Copy your Notational Velocity application (so it's called "Notational Velocity copy" or whatever)
  2. Adjust the key in the info.plist of the package so that the CFBundleIdentifier points someplace different (e.g., net.notational.velocity2)
  3. Launch the NV copy and adjust the notes directory to also be something different
That's it! Now you've got two Notational Velocities running side by side. You can even give them different hot keys and different fonts so you can tell them apart.

I think the same thing would work with nvAlt, which by the way will sync your tags to simplenote, which is a big deal.

Check out the mini-discussion with heavy-weight Superuser @Lri and a 
cleaner solution using defaults write and ditto.

6 comments:

bzoooty said...

Hi, thanks for this tip. It's working great for me so far.

First, what do you mean when you say it's "cleaner" to do it the other way (posted by superuser)? Does that just mean it's arguably easier to set up, or are there definite benefits to the other way? Is functionality different? I found your method quite straightforward.

Second, what happens to Simplenote synch? Do the two copies sync entirely separately (i.e. to two different Simplenote accounts)?

Thanks so much for your help--and for the original post. I like nvALT, but it has drawbacks and I much prefer the simplicity of the original NV. Now I get that simplicity twice over!

bzoooty said...

Everything's working great except my second copy of the application (nv2), which uses a different data folder, refuses to remember my Simplenote password.

That is, I'm running two versions of the app and each is supposed to sync with a different Simplenote account, but nv2 has to be manually synced each time I restart the app.

Anyway, if you have any suggestions and the time to share them I'd love to hear. I do not do much in the way of programming, but I'd be happy to do whatever is necessary to fix this issue.

Thanks.

Dan Rosenstark said...

Thanks bzooty. Yes, the other solution is the same, just done via script.

Regarding your password problem, try setting your PASSWORD on both accounts to be the same thing, and let me know if that helps at all. Also, does NV completely forget your username and password?

Random note is that my setup works, and I followed these instructions. I'm using nvALT but it should be the same. However, I would make sure to make as much stuff different as possible, especially the name of the app, etc.

bzoooty said...

Thanks for the response.

I've tried everything I can think of, and running two copies of the original NV separately (under different names, with different keys in the plist file) creates password difficulties with Simplenote. Even with the two separate Simplenote accounts running the same password, the second copy of NV fails to remember the password.

Running one copy of NV and one copy of nvALT has never given me an trouble whatsoever. I did not even need to modify the plist.

Dan Rosenstark said...

That's freaky, because I'm running two nvAlt instances. Hmmm... no ideas, though, at least for now.

Dan Rosenstark said...

actually, have you tried just deleting relevant keys in your keychain. Maybe you've got some extras. Delete all the keys relating to nvAlt, perhaps?