Very good for plain text writing

I’ve used a wide range of word processors and text processors, and Ulysses is the best I’ve come across for writing.

What kept me away from Ulysses for some years was that it keeps documents in a single large database (tucked away in the Library folder). That proprietary approach—“do everything in this one program”—strips away many of the advantages of plain text files. Instead of being easily editable in a variety of applications, they are locked into a proprietary format.

However, Ulysses can easily handle loose text files in their own folder using its “External Folders” feature. Working this way, you lose a few minor features (for example, the ability to set a typing target for a document) but Ulysses works wonderfully as a text editor for creative writing—better than anything else I’ve used.

Some of the features I particularly liked:

* Long documents can be divided and split into shorter ones with a single keystroke.

* If the split is made at a heading (preceded with a hash symbol), the heading becomes the title of the new document. Change the heading in the document and the filename instantly changes to match.

* Automatically created documents can be saved with either a text or markdown extension (this is set by folder), and can be rearranged into an arbitrary order.

* Files can be “glued” so they stay together and scroll as a document, even though they remain separate files on the disk. They can also be printed as a group, or viewed and scrolled through as if they were a single multipage document.

* Groups of files can be merged into a single document (creating a single text file from many)

* Changes made to the files themselves (adding a new folder, moving files around) are immediately reflected in the Ulysses “Library” listing.

Using these well-conceived features, it is easy to throw ideas down on the page, rearrange them, extending rough ideas into outlines, outlines into chapters, moving sections around. Formatting is all done with Markdown, which produces well structured documents and offers many options for exporting files. Few of us write methodically from start to finish, and the ability to easily rearrange sections of a document and easily view them by file title is a huge boon as a document gets longer.

This mostly addresses Ulysses’ ability to organize documents. As a text processing app, it works well. The interface is clean and logical, and headings with hash marks are outdented, which makes the document structure easy to see. Boldfacing, headings and italics are all done using Markdown codes (or from a menu), which is simple to use.

DMKZ about Ulysses – The Ultimate Writing App, v2.5.2