To capture and keep track of all my notes I uses nvALT on the Mac and Notesy on my iPhone and iPad. I sync these two using Dropbox and it only takes a couple of minutes to set up. Before discovering Notesy I used Simplenote on iOS and syncronised nvALT with that but much prefer my current setup. Firstly I opened up the preferences of nvALT, turned off the Syncronization with Simple note and pointed it to read notes from a folder that I’d created on Dropbox.

I then changed nvALT to store the notes as plain text files rather than a single database so that Notesy could read it. Depending on your personal preferences you can choose to store your notes as rich text or even HTML formatted documents but I don’t really have a need for this as I am choosing to store them all as markdown documents which gives me the ability to have formatting if I need it but also lets me read them on anything that can view plain text files.

Depending on how you want to work with your notes you can choose a variety of formats that nvALT can save as. Under the Notes Storage section click the blank space to the left of the “-” and you can add in the format that you would like to save notes as by default. 

Finally I set up Notesy on my iOS device which requires me to select the Dropbox folder that I am storing my notes in and it will go through and download them to the device. On another note, Notesy will also handle folders within the main note folder and also handles symbolic links quite well.

To change the default format that Notey saves as, go to the advanced settings and you will find the option there. 

Enjoy!