When comparing nvALT vs TotalTerminal, the Slant community recommends TotalTerminal for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for macOS?” TotalTerminal is ranked 20th while nvALT is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose TotalTerminal is:
TotalTerminal is a plugin for Terminal.app. It provides persistent Visor Window which slides down when you press a hot-key.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Powerful search syntax
nvALT has a simple text box at the top (similar to that of a web browser) and when you start typing inside it, nvALT immediately displays a drop-down box of all the notes that contain the text you are searching for. The more you type, the more the search is narrowed down.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Free
Pro MultiMarkdown 3 support
Has built-in support for MultiMarkdown 3.
Pro Powerful note-taking features
nvALT is not only used for simple text editing but also as a powerful tool for taking notes, TODOs, phone numbers and every other piece of information that can be stored in a plain-text file.
This is because nvALT is not designed only as a tool to write text, but also as a powerful search and organize tool for plain-text files.
Pro Right to Left support
Pro Allows quick access to the terminal system-wide
TotalTerminal is a plugin for Terminal.app. It provides persistent Visor Window which slides down when you press a hot-key.
Pro Quake style window show/hide
You maybe know or don't know Quake from Id Software. But this game had the best idea to hide/show a terminal window. Simply using full width but 26 rows. On show the widow slid down from top of screen. On hide it mode up to top edge of the screen until it disappeared. 2nd next best was the semi translucent background. You could still see through the terminal window while it was shown.
The same style is now available in TotalTerminal and iTerm2 (OSX Terminal replacement - no Terminal plugin).
Cons
Con Not very powerful as far as text editing goes
nvALT's strength is its search feature. It has some basic text-editing features such as cut, paste, find-and-replace and so on. But it doesn't have any advanced text manipulation features available in other editors.
Con No longer under active development
Con Doesn't work on El Capitan with SIP on
Apple introduced a new security feature in OSX El Capitan, called System Integrity Protection, that, among other things, does not allow augmenting Terminal. While it's possible to turn SIP off (instructions on how to turn off SIP and get TotalTerminal working on El Capitan can be found here) it is not recommended.