Ulysses – The Ultimate Writing App App Reviews

I am using Ulysses both for my private writing as well as for business correspondence and documentation. On top of that, it is a real pleasure to use — it just feels right and looks gorgeous. Best of all, The Soulmen walk the talk: Write. Anything. Anywhere!

I’ve been using Ulysses for about three years now, and I can honestly say in that time, it has assumed more and more responsibility until it’s become very nearly my only writing environment. I keep all my journals, all my notes, all my long-form fiction writing, and all my research and academic writing in this little space, and in spite of the volume of text, it never feels bloated, never feels anything less than airy, nimble and drop-dead beautiful to work in. The sync has been flawless for me, allowing me to never have to worry about losing my work. I can also move between my iMac and MacBook (and with the iOS version installed my iPad, and iPhone as well) with zero friction, allowing me to add notes or capture ideas or images which carry over to any device I want to use nearly instantly. I have over 800,000 words in Ulysses (I know this because the ability to grab statistics is so robust I can have everything from a single sheet to any given project to the whole library upon request) comprising countless projects and the software hasn’t let me down or even gotten in my way a single time in three years. You can make your writing environment as minimal as you like, with any theme you like. It’s such a lovely space to work in—you really need to see it for yourself to appreciate what a difference this can make to your creativity. With no distractions, I spend so much more time in the words. It’s invaluable. Updates are regular and generous between major versions, and the wonderful people at Soulmen who create this are responsive and helpful. Export features are all you are likely to need. The only caveat is that if you want to fine-tune your export per type, you’ll need some basic CSS skills. Even if you don’t, you can simply export to Word and do formatting and layout there if that’s what you’re comfortable with. If you are a writer of any kind, this is your writing kit. Worth every last penny.

The application allows for a pure distraction free writing environment and techniques to encourage the process. The best thing I find about the app though is its database stype facility for storing your writing. There is no way to lose it. Everything I write is written in a year and every month for that year. It is so logical and basically is an automated document manager. I also love the iPad version as it is so close to the desktop version you really do just flow between environments. For offline publishing I go a bit of an extra mile and use Marseditl. I simply copy my doccuent as text to Marsedit and publish. I’ve been doing it this way for so long the flow is completely natural.

At first I thought this would be too simple an app, but it is perfect. I have never been more productive. With no distractions, or playing with formatting as i write, I’m incredibly focused. Don’t underestimate the value of seperating the formatting from the content and focusing on the later. I’ve finished three non-fiction books and hundreds of blog posts over the last year. Every time I have a writing idea, I create a new sheet on the iPhone app and type in one sentence which captures the message. When I sit down to write on my computer, or on the iPad app when I’m on a plane, (the iPad app is outstanding by the say, makes an iPad usable for something other than movies), my sheets are all there ready for me to expand on my ideas. Finally WP publishing makes this the only writing app you’ll ever need. Technical, blog, novel, whatever you’re doing, don’t even think about Word or Pages, this app is how writing gets done.

Wouldn’t sync between Mac on iCloud so I’m returning it…worked with Ulysses supported and moved around from one support staffer to another and they kept telling this isn’t how syncing is supposed to work as if this explained what was wrong. The general thrust is that Ulysses DOES NOT work well with iCloud and features are disabled if you you dropbox…such as word count. In other words the app is broken and, therefore, spending so much money on it may be foolish. NOT RECOMMENDED FOR ANYONE.

This is a great app. It works like any markdown app like Byword or iAWriter, but you can also keep your files in groups of “sheets", where you can move around the order, and export the group as it’s own document in a variety of formats (HTML, docx, markdown, rich text and plain text). It also lets you view paragraph numbers and keeps track of your line count. It also stores “versions” of your files where you can browse previous versions you wrote through a Time-Machine like interface. I had an issue with Sierra where my files would not show up and were displayed as “Downloading” indefinitely. To get around this, Eline at Ulysses support advised the following: - Go to your macOS System Preferences... › iCloud - Click on the “Options” button next to "iCloud Drive” - Disable “Optimize Mac Storage This worked for me. In the future I am also going to do a manual backup to Dropbox every now and then as I have to sync between multiple laptops and every once in a while I run into a scary snag like this.

I absolutely love the distraction-free writing mode and couldnt get anything done w/o it.

Hey guys, i love your software. But please tend to this new glitch that menaces me: sometimes when i type whole paragraphs dissapear at some point (you can not select them or anything at this moment) it goes away by pressing “Enter a couple of times”. This glitch is so omnipresent that you probably noticed it yourself. In case you did not: i have latest macOS Sierra on a macBook Pro 2015.

After I have tried several apps for writers I came to the conclusion that this is the best app in this niche. It has nice UI relevant to mac os design. It is simple to use.. I have started to write first pages in a matter of minutes, compare to other apps I have spent hours to read tutorials, videos and docs.

I bought it to write projects and scientific articles but then I discovered that it is not possible to embed formulas! Useless for me.

Last night, I made the leap to using Ulysses. I wanted to do something to supplement Scrivener for my writing workflow. I am so annoyed that Scrivener isn’t moving faster on the iOS version, and with my impending book I really wanted a way to be more portable and nimble with my writing options. I had known of Ulysses and even downloaded a trial about a year ago. At the time, I wasn’t ready. With dipping my toe into Bywords, and with learning more about portability, exporting, and distraction free writing, I felt I was ready now. I finally see the benefits of writing in markdown. I see the benefits of a platform like Ulysses: simple interface; portability; fewer distractions; ability to create an organizational structure that works for me. I downloaded it. I jumped into the learning curve. And I am truly liking it! Having been raised on “traditional” word processors, making the jump to markdown was a bit intimidating and, frankly, felt like “taking a step backwards.” But once I let go and opened my eyes, I see it’s value. And I am enjoying it very much. In fact, I am looking for ways to incorporate it into other workflow areas. So how does this relate to Scrivener? I am not quite sure if I was looking for an alternative to Scrivener or a supplement. I was vacillating. Now, after having spent time with Ulysses (and, to a degree, Bywords), I am starting to see how they can live in harmony with Scrivener. There is so much power in Scrivener. There are so many options and, frankly, really cool features that there is a definite place for it. It’s a workhorse. But Ulysses definitely has it’s advantages. It gets rid of all the muckitymuck and allows me to just write. If I choose, I can always export all the work done in Ulysses into Scrivener to put that programs power/features to work. So, yes, I am delighted with my choice. Very delighted indeed!

First of all, great work developers. A truly great app. This is by far the best Markdown file editor / manager I’ve found for Mac, though it does overpriced (But you got me to pay for it anyway). If there was one thing I really think it needs however, it would be support for the standard code block (The ``` syntax). It supports it inilne, but not on a block level. As a code who loves to write blog posts about code, this would make the transition from the app to the web seamless. Either way, great work guys and hope you continue to improve it.

Edit: The newest version crashes for no apparent reason. The rest of my review is the same and the crashes aren’t frequent and never lose my progress (thank god), but it’s annoying. This is my favorite writing app for its aesthetics and convinence, but I wish they would fix the search feature so you could “find whole words” instead of fragments. The other problem is when I sort groups because when I put a group under another, it takes it in. It would be better if it you’d hold a group under another to sort it in.

The app itself is pretty good, but the customer service leaves much to be desired. When you have Ulysses’ dark theme active and have the dark theme for OS X active, there is a 1px gap between Ulysses and the OS X top bar. This is seriously annoying if you’re trying to work in the dark and don’t want a bright line in your face. The customer service had no solution for this and just sent me to Apple, telling me it’s their fault. When I shared that switching to a dark wallpaper helped, and it might be useful for other customers, they just shoved it right back in my face, telling me that they can’t tell people to change their wallpapers. I didn’t say that they should tell people anything! I just thought having an option would be better than saying that there’s no fix. I mean, why not at least give the customer the option? At least give them something they can do, instead of telling them there’s nothing and having them suffer for it? I really don’t know what this person’s issue was, but it was inappropriate. In the past, they’ve been better, but recently, the time it’s taken them to respond has also increased, and the quality has decreased by a lot. When I pay this much for an app, I like to know I’m getting quality customer service, too. Just be aware of this issue when making the decision to buy. I know I’m upset with it. I wouldn’t want you to feel like you’re not getting your money’s worth, either. — And, by the way, the dark wallpaper idea does really work. I don’t know how many others like to write at night without eyestrain. It’s easy to make a quick switch to a darker wallpaper temporarily to avoid that annoying bright line — and that, unlike complaining to Apple, or e-mailing Ulysses support — is actually something that will help.

Now writing a third novel using Ulysses, and I can hardly imagine using another app now. Ulysses is simple, but not too simple, elegant, and deceptively powerful. It has all the features I need, and none of the features I don’t need. It’s modern and streamlined. A couple of reviews below mine mention that it’s not for longform writing. I don’t think they understand how the app works. I’ve written 250,000 words already in Ulysses. It does take a day or so to wrap your head around it, but once you do, you will love it. In the past I’ve used Scrivener, Google Docs, Word, Pages, and several others. This tops them all! Of course, I do still use Pages for track changes when working with my editor before publishing.

I bought both iOS and Mac version of the product. My intent was to use both for writing documents and syncing through iCloud. It worked OK initially, but one day I lost ALL of my documents on iPhone/iPad and Mac. A creaptic message that some .XML file is unavailable obviously didn’t help. When I reached out to the help desk they suggested to reboot computers and when this obviously didn’t help they stopped responding to my emails. Obviously a very buggy product, BEWARE YOU CON LOSE YOUR WORK!!!!!

I started using this app 2 years ago and I have used it in bunch of periods during these 2 years but not continuously. I always wanted to use GTD and I thought Ulysses was the magic bullet (i’ve tried Things $70 app and other apps - previously I used to think was the magic bullet). Ulysses is a great app really well designed easy on the eye. I have a CS background and I really appreciated the “New Filter” idea that automatically filters (old & new) content depending on a new filter. So why didn’t I use it all the time? It’s obviously got to do with one’s personality. I know people who swear by Things.app which I found myself using purely for storing lists of things (as in, not as a GTD system) and was at some point even happy with Things. So if you are disciplined and stuff, then you can use pretty much any app (even notepad). I’m not disciplined at all in this respect. So for me, I found it “hard" to enter notes and keywords and filtering all that stuff. “Hard” in the sense that it was not fun and it felt like too much effort into bookkeeping — and Ulysses doesn’t transform this process into fun. (Well, whether this is in the scope of Ulysses is a completely different question.) Another thing is that it traps you in the sense that it can be quite tricky to get notes from the command line (or any other program that you’d write — remember my CS background). This means that the filters allowed by Ulysses are highly restricted (in ways one normally doesn’t even realize until you start thinking seriously about it). It’s possible that future versions of Ulysses might have this changed — but this would just mean giving complete programmability to the user with a text representation of everything that’s going on. That would put more burden on the user but it also gives the user unlimited freedom. Anyway, the take-away (for people with some programming background) is that it’s better to store stuff in a directory and write your own filter programs. Org-mode in emacs is a decent “viewer” for your files. This is what I’m using now… I’m still not doing GTD or anything (so that part has remained a constant in my life)… but at least I’m free to think and write my own powerful filters… Hope this helps someone who is thinking about investing $45 to buy this app and investing a lot of time using it.

This is an awesome text editor. It’s deffinitely the best way to write where you don’t have to worry about formatting or huge menus of unnessessary options like you would in MSWord. You just write. I also love the way it’s based off Markdown and therefore allows you to add basic formatting you may need in a natural and efficient way. The Markdown aspect also helps me to think more organizationally with the way headers work. I use Ulysses primarily for note-taking for my computer science classes. Ulyssses is great for this because I’m constantly writing down snippets of code to remember, and with the Ulysses Markdown workflow I can just make a huge code blog for any code snippets I use. And then when I export my notes, Ulysses nicely seperates my code from my text in a pleasing way. It would be hella dope if Ulysses did code syntax highlighting in code snippets, but that would be a bit cray, there’d have to be an auto-detect coding language thing or a global coding language set or individual language settings per code block, but all that would get cray complicated, so it’s probably better without all this cray stuff. #### __**Feature Request**__ #### The only thing I wish that Ulysses supported was image preview in the text editor. Whenever I add an image to a document, I always wish I was able to see a basic preview in the editor instead of the little “IMG” icon. This is my use case: I often take class notes with Ulysses. I’ll have folders for iindividual classes and then a bunch of different notes from lectures. It’s so great for me to be able to use Ulysses’ search functions to find certain things in my notes. BUT OFTEN, I have images in my notes to help better explain certain concepts. When I go to read my notes, I wish I didn’t have to export something or export preview to read my notes, but could just read my notes straight-up in the text editor and see my images. Anyway, Ulysses is super swag and you should use it.

I started using this app a while ago, and got distracted by other things and forgot about it. Then I found it again and took another look. Syncing seems to be much better now. I haven’t had any problems finding my docs on any device I use. This makes it a pleasant alternative to other note taking apps where I’m limited to plain text or to RTF. Markdown is so much quicker. I use it in conjunction with the app on my iPad and find I can write almost anywhere. This has made my life much easier. I recommend getting both this and the iPad or iPhone app for the most flexibility.

Along with its iPad companion app (or vice versa - depending on how you look at it), this is the best writing program combination there is! Well, now iPhone as well as iPad Pro. What more can I ask for? This was my review for 2.0. Well, they delivered more and better! The program keeps on getting better, but it’s still the best distraction-free writing program!