Not ready for academic writing - but good for note taking

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.

deef67 about Ulysses – The Ultimate Writing App, v2.7.2