A keyboard-first way to write
I lose a thought the second I reach for the mouse. That’s not a figure of speech — it’s the actual, specific reason so much of Plainva is built around never having to leave the keyboard while you write.
Structure without breaking stride
Type / and a menu comes to you instead of the other way around — headings, lists, tables, callouts, code blocks, footnotes, even an emoji, more than two dozen commands, filtered as you type. I didn’t want a formatting toolbar you have to go hunting for across the screen; I wanted structure to be one keystroke away, right where the cursor already is. Links work the same way: [[ starts a wiki link with autocomplete over your whole vault, @ drops in mentions and dynamic date tokens, and if you rename that note later, every link to it across the vault updates itself. Broken links used to be the tax I paid for renaming things. In Plainva it just isn’t anymore.
Getting anywhere without losing your place
When I need to be somewhere else fast, it’s Ctrl/Cmd+O — a fuzzy quick switcher. A few letters of a title, Enter, done. If the note doesn’t exist yet, Enter creates it, correctly formatted, title already filled in, so “find” and “create” stop being two separate things I have to think about. Ctrl/Cmd+P opens a command palette with everything else Plainva can do, searchable, so I never have to remember which menu an action is hiding in — splitting the editor, printing to PDF, opening the graph, all without my hands leaving home row.
None of this is flashy on its own. Together it’s the difference between catching a thought and losing it: link it to what it belongs with, and get back to writing before it slips away. That’s really the only thing I want from a tool like this.
- Shortcuts: keyboard reference
- Try it: plainva.com
— Marco