Ulysses – The Ultimate Writing App App Reviews

Very clean and useful. Frozen on my iMac (macOS Sierra).

I absolutely love using Ulysses. It really motivates me by stripping away all the fancy formatting and extra options that I get distracted by (or use purposefully to avoid writing). I’ve tried Scrivener, Word, Google Docs…they all had a learning curve based on endless unnecessary features that I couldn’t use if I tried. Formatting, documentation, special page types, references, etc - none of that matters without the core of any written work: words. Ulysses brings you back to what really matters. Sometimes, simpler is better. One feature I would die for is the ability to track progress per session. There are goals and statistics and such, but all of that is comprehensive to the selected pages, not based on something like “since I set this timer” or “since I opened this doc.” I used that a lot when I was trialing Scrivener. I would LOVE that feature, and in my opinion, it would definitively place Ulysses above the rest.

This is the perfect tool for writing. Everything’s so nice and really makes me concentrate on writing itself. My only request is to be able to password protect certain folders/sheets.

Love the new update! Pretty much everyhting that I would use syntax wise is now on the Touch Bar as well! I have found the writing enviroment to be second to none, and support has been absolutely fantasstic for me when I had an issue with Wordpress Export (it ended up being an issue with my hosting provider, not Ulysses).

The marketplace for clean, simple writing apps is surprisingly crowded. I have tried them all and Ulysses is the one I came back to and keep using. It strikes the right balance between features and how it “feels” to use it. The folders and iCloud syncing across devices works flawlessly. The export capabilites are exactly what I need and no more. All-in-all, I really enjoy writing in this app.

I use and love Ulysses for writing scripts for my videos, but I don’t use it to manage and edit all of my text files. I also heavily use Text Edit, and with this latest update Ulysses hijacked a bunch of non standard text files (that don’t end with “.txt”) to open in Ulysses by default. And now I can’t open the files in text edit without first going into System Preferences because MacOS Seirra thinks these files are now unidentified application files. This has seriously hampered my ability to work, and my attempts to visit the support website dead end. A check at downforeveryoneorjustme.com show that it appears to be down completely.

I love writing in Ulysses. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is not there yet. Which means that I have to export to DOCX when it is time to share with co-workers. And this turns out to be much more laborious than it ought to be because Ulysses does not export styles correctly. Instead of defining Word’s document styles according the definitions in Ulysses style sheets, Ulysses applies paragraph- and character-level formatting to the contents of documents exported to DOCX. This means that I have to go through and manually update all the styles to reflect the formatting that I already specified in my Ulysses style sheet after exporting to DOCX. I’ve been asking the good people at Soulmen to fix this for a very long time and was hopeful when the release notes for the latest update referred to improved DOCX support, but the same old limitation is still there. When and if this ever gets fixed, Ulysses will receive its fifth star from this reviewer.

Ulysses gets so many things right, and the developers do a great job of listening to their users.

I bought Ulysses quite some time ago but was also using Alternote, which is an app for Evernote because Evernote’s UI is trash. The only reason I have an Evernote account however, is for work. So, I figured, why not use Alternote? All was good for a time and I was happy with using both Alternote and Ulysses. However, Evernote decided to continue their downward trend of being a terrible software company but trying to make it seem okay for their employees to read people’s notes. They’ve since reversed the decision but anyone who comes to the point of thinking that’s okay in the first place has issues, and not caring about customers is a major issue. On to Ulysses though! I took an afternoon and ported all of my notes over to Ulysses and deleted my personal content in Evernote. In the process, I discovered some neat things about Ulysses like customizing the icons for each note and neat grouping/formatting/&c. I am very pleased and will start porting my content in Clear to Ulysses as well. Keep up the great work!

Ulysses minimalist looks are deceiving: it has everything you need for writing. It does not have all the distracting, fun to explore, time wasting features of cruise ship writing tools. Ulysses is more like one of those speed demon cigarette boats used for smuggling, only for writing.

I recently switched to Ulysses for my PhD disertation and I absolutely love it. Markup XL is super simple to learn and once you make/find a style sheet that suits you, it is the best way to write. Well worth the price tag. Updates seem very frequent, which is nice. There are a lot of other apps out there that have infrequent updates or lack of support, but I have only experienced the oppostie with Ulysses and its team.

I’ve come around to Ulysses as a repository for notes, now that they’ve added the abilty to link to a particular sheet in the Mac version as well as the iOS versions. The combination of folder structuring AND custom filters puts it way ahead of Bear (which I’d been looking at for several months) and the iOS integration beats out NV. They have promised that the ability to conduct Boolean searches (i.e. find a document that does NOT have a phrase) is coming…. The trick to addressing the RTF issues I noted below is to drag the RTF into Ulysses, which triggers its built-in RTF -> Markdown conversion, which works pretty well. A remaining nuisance is that any text in square brackets is treated as a link, so if you are working with a lot of quotations and are used to bracketing items that have changed, prepare to start escaping the first bracket. And find and replace are still on a per-document basis. So text cleaning is not something that you can do easily all at once. here’s my earlier review: I wanted to like Ulysses, and it seemed a natural fit since I do most of my short-form writing in Byword and longer work in Scrivener. But in practice it shows a lot of shortcomings. Markdown is great if you are wriiting a 300 word piece for a website, but in practice I found using characters for formatting rather than as characters constantly got in the way of my writing flow. Pasting from PDFs or any rich text creates extra work correcting smart quotes, ellipses, etc. that don’t transfer into a plain text format correctly. There’s no way to view footnotes inilne while writing. Comments disappear when exporting to Word. Lots of little annoyances that slow down writing in practice, especially if your writing involves drawing together quotations etc. from many other documents in mixed formats. Tried it repeatedly given all the hype & every time I end up moving the project into something else.

I decided to go all in with this Mac version as well the iOS apps. I am so pleased with how well they work together. I’ve written things on my iPad, iPhone, and Mac and it all feels the same. At first I was a little wary of having all my writing organized in sheets and groups in one single library, but after using Ulysses for more than a month, I like not having to worry about where I saved something. Syncing via iCloud has been seamless and without problem. It’s nice how quick is to launch the app and get writing when you have a good idea or note you want to jot down. The developers have done a wonderful job balancing a full featured app with keeping the interface intuitive and user friendly. I recommend this app as well as its iOS compliment. You’ll really love the integration across all devices.

Having spent years with multiple word processing documents constantly open for reference, Ulysses comes as a relief. It allows me to keep all my references, drafts and ideas all in one application where I can access them instantly and in context. The plain-text driven interface uses Markdown, which keeps formatting simple and not tied to the neverending hot mess that comes from Redmond. I love the use of sheets to organize sections of longer documents. I use Ulysses to develop business documents for product design and marketing. It helps me to focus on the most important parts of each concept, and allows me to produce final documents for my team that really work. Ulysses is super fast and a pleasure to use!

I’ve used several of the apps available for the Mac/PC over the years. Ulysses is far and above the best solution I’ve ever used. It easily allows for breaking writing into any level of resolution you want and allows for special areas like research. My writing style usually means I like to keep lots of images with the chapters I am working on for resources and reminders of details I want to add, and this program handles them easily WITHOUT making it difficult to extract the images later on. Most important, the syncing feature instnatly updates my computer, tablet and phone, so all writing, research and images stay together. To be able to quickly input an idea into my phone and then later flesh it out on the macbook is so useful. No more napkins with scribbles or worse - ideas you promise to remember, but don’t. I love this app.

I had one goal in mind getting this software: I wanted to have a marginless text document with a large size font. I work on a large flatscreen tv and that setting works best. Everything went wrong that could go wrong with my experience. Firstly, there is no convience to the program. In order to remove margins one has to go into the “code” and find them. There is no simple interface. The font was impossible. I could not understand how there is no font size interface with simple numbers like 13 or 18. Instead, they wish you to use the cmd + or -. It was so frustrating because as I did this command, the font did get bigger, but continued to travel accross my screen making a huge margin. So now, only my 12 something font might fill up my screen. Large font became pushed and shoved into the lower right hand corner. Even after multiple attempts, I am not sure if I could even make the margins go away. I went through the code and made all of it zero in the margins. This is all something I can do in other leading word processors easily and within seconds. I am not a newcomer to electronics and this program is far too difficult to use. It is bulky, complicated, and needs to slim way down. Maybe after a few days of working on it, I might find it of excellence… or not. I’m not sure whyit looks like I’m the only one writing this sort of thing, because it seems lots of people have voted positively. I don’t need tech support, I need a new program.

This program will be exceptional for my purposes once it properly supports GitHub-style ``` code sections. Also, certain things like annotations do not work with external folders. I believe this could be entirely possible using the hidden plist files that you are using already. 5-stars when these are fixed :-)

The beautiful design and simplicity just makes me wanna type something! I also love the idea that all my ‘writings’ are gathered together in one place. I use it to write quick notes, journals, essays, and all kinds of writings that I have to do! The iOS version of the app works seamlessly and I feel like I am in total control of my TEXTS!!! Beautiful and intuitive. I have used Scrivener, but I don’t do ‘novel’ length writing and found many of the features unused. Also, it did not support iCloud syncing. Scrivener only had dropbox syncing which was definitely less seamless then Ulysses’s iCloud Sync. This is an amazing app. It may seem pricy but you definitely get what you are paying for.

I have used Ulysses for more than three years but my experiences in the last few months lead me to believe that Ulysses has a problem rendering sheet names, especially in the context of a large writing project. My attempts to navigate and select sheets displayed in a sheet listing often resulted in an entire list(s) of sheet names scratched out by multiple horizontal lines where the names are no longer readable. I tried to get rid of horizontal lines, but they always return without any warning. Working on a large project with this kind rendering behavior became a huge distraction for me. The problem became so severe that I decided to move my entire writing project to another writing platform. Ulysses support is aware of the problem, and it is believed to be an issue with the Mac OS.

Ulysses is beyond the best in class when it comes to writing software. I’ve been using it full-time for the last three years, and I wouldn’t switch to anything else. The sync is flawless, the writing environment is clean, and the organization is simple, flexible, and powerful. If you’re serious about writing, you will NOT regret purchasing this. It’s pro software from head to toe, and exceptionally well-executed.