Best application for writing

In college I tried a number of writing applications including Pages and Scriviner, as well as plain text editors such as Byword. When I heard that this new version of Ulysses was coming out, I followed closely on its progress, and was not dissapointed when I bought it immediately upon release.

Writers accustomed to using rich text editors will have to get used to writing in plain text instead—but the markup is simple (the default is similar to Markdown), and it doesn’t take long to realize how powerful this can be. For example, I have the markup customized so that % at the beginning of a paragraph makes it a comment. This makes it trivial to cut out paragraphs, or interleave notes with your writing (when exporting your writing, you can choose to have comments removed automatically). With pipe characters, I can |surround| a word to highlight it; often I use this to indicate words or phrases I’d like to revisit. Later, I can search for all highlights (you can search for specific markup types as well as words) and quickly go through and revise.

If you like fonts and colors, you’ll love the ability to switch between themes, as well as create your own and customize them. This is another advantage of writing in plain text: fonts and colors are not encoded into the text itself, so you can instantly change the entire interface to dark for nighttime writing, or switch to a different font.

The organizational features are powerful as well. The concept of “sheets” encourages breaking up your writing into manageable sections, which can easily be worked on individually, rearranged, filtered, and exported to a single document. Sheets are organized into “groups”, but can be tagged, so you can filter to get a list of all sheets for a common theme accross groups, and work on the fitered list as if it were it’s own group (filters that you use often can also be saved). The new split-screen feature in OS X pairs nicely with Ulysses, and allows you to work full-screen with notes on one side and your draft on the other.

Even with all these features, the application still feels much simpler than a word processing application or Scrivener.

The developers have been very responsive to feedback, and have improved the application tremendously since its initial release. I’ve seen a number of my feature requests/suggestions show up in updates (this is fun, whether or not my input had any effect).

There’s a free trial at ulyssesapp.com/mac - try it out for a real project. It deserves your attention!

j.k.e.l.m about Ulysses – The Ultimate Writing App