4 ms·

Ulysses: a structured/semantic document editor for OS X

36 points by crux 17y ago

snprbob86 17y ago
This is really cool. There are a lot of areas where the state of the art really is Word and Excel. For some use cases, a horizontal application is perfectly adequate. However, all the rest are opportunities for enterprising hackers.
- zitterbewegung 17y ago
  I actually made a poetry book in LaTeX. It wasn't THAT hard.
Locke1689 17y ago
Pretty cool. I do have to say that I prefer LaTeX though. If you're not into writing LaTeX you may want to try LyX (http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/). It's a WYSIWYM LaTeX editor for Windows and UNIX-like (including OS X). Heh, although when I say "Ulysses" out loud it makes me think "useless."
- cstross 17y ago
  Apples and oranges. LaTeX is a formatter. (Actually a full-blown interpreter, but it's generally used for producing typeset text output from command files.) Ulysses and Scrivener are an utterly different class of application; they're used for composition and editing of complex compound documents, with an emphasis on managing the structure (e.g. they both make it utterly trivial to change the order of chapters in a book, swap subsections within a chapter, write the text with no distractions, or mess around with the outline). LyX is, effectively, a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX (that is handicapped by not being flexible enough to generate arbitrary LaTeX documents, and so it tends to be restricted to using a set range of LaTeX templates). Might as well be comparing motorcycles and ro-ro ferries. Finally: parading your lack of knowledge of classical mythology or modernist literature really doesn't do you any favours.
  - crux 17y ago
    It also bears mentioning that both Scrivener and Ulysses have their own pretty powerful LaTeX export functions, though I haven't thoroughly used either one.
  - Locke1689 17y ago
    First, thanks for the information. I didn't understand from the site that Ulysses is actually more of an organizational tool. It wasn't until I read this[1] review article that I understood that. However, you yourself made a few mistakes. Technically, LaTeX is not a formatter, it is a markup language for the TeX typesetting system. In addition, it is actually not an interpreter (in the same way that HTML is not an interpreter). LyX is, as I said, a WYSIWYM editor for LaTeX. It is also allows LaTeX insertion and imports, so it should be arbitrarily flexible, not handicapped. Finally: parading your lack of knowledge of classical mythology or modernist literature really doesn't do you any favours. Hmm. Actually I have read Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegans Wake, as well as the Odyssey. James Joyce is probably one of my picks for greatest authors who ever lived. My little remark was one of whimsy, commenting on a little phonetic wordplay, not an expression of ignorance. [1] http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/review/ulysses_is_a_heroic_writers_application/ http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/review/ulysses_is_a_heroic_wr...
petercooper 17y ago
Anyone here ready to earn some karma by vouching for it and giving a few paragraphs on why I absolutely must try this out? :-)
- crux 17y ago
  I can tell you why I like it. There's an app that's been repped for here called Scrivener, and like Scrivener (it predates Scr., actually), Ulysses is an application that is supposed to make writing large amounts of text more sane than standard word processors. It essentially combines elements of outliners and information managers with a composition interface. In general the UI for Ulysses is very thoroughly thought out, and somewhat idiosyncratic for that fact. Many people find it lacking or uncomfortable in one way or another, but I can tell you that every element of the UI has been considered and applied to fulfill the designers' very specific goal. One of those UI values is that it's very semantically correct. There's no formatting at all, except auto-formatting that you define yourself, which will recognize plaintext tags. The way this shakes out is that I will write a sentence like this: The &&quick&& brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. And then define a tag called 'emphasis', which is formed by a '&&' wrap, and displays itself in a certain way depending on whether it's being viewed in a window, fullscreen, printed, et cetera. If you are a fan of working in plaintext and you are interested in more structured ways to write long-form text, I think it's a great program. EDIT: changed example markup to something more exotic for HN's own parser
  - derefr 17y ago
    You seem to know writing tools, so: if I already have a composition interface I prefer—OmmWriter, in my case—what would be a good pure outliner/information manager to act as a complement to it? Preferably not a data silo; I push all my actual writing to Github with each revision, so a plaintext format that could come along for the ride and wouldn't require a special viewer would be nice.
    - crux 17y ago
      I'm not sure I fully understand, but if by 'not a data silo' you mean you're ok with having an application to view these things, but prefer that they be stored as real files, rather than a flat database, I strongly recommend EagleFiler. No one of its features is very shiny or mindblowing as the NLP of DEVONthink, for instance, but it's very well thought out and efficient. In particular I think it has the best 'capture' function for taking the frontmost document from the current application and saving it to the EF database (which consists of an index file as well as a regular Finder-friendly file hierarchy)
jmatt 17y ago
Ok so after I decided that it was interesting and cool, my first thought was, "What's the emacs-mode for Ulysses?". I couldn't find one so it looks like I may have to actually download and install it. Anyone know of similar emacs or vim modes for writing?
- vorador 17y ago
  A lot of features seem to overlap with org-mode.
- crux 17y ago
  I don't know of any such vim mode but I'd be very interested to hear about it. The closest I have is a script that turns on things like wrap-by-word and scroll-by-visual-line (given that in prose, what vim thinks of as lines, we think of as paragraphs)
grinich 17y ago
Writeroom is pretty great too. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
- Hagelin 17y ago
  It's even better when combined with QuickCursor (free download), which allows you to, with a keystroke, edit the contents of almost any textfield in WriteRoom. It also works with other editors such as TextMate. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/ http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/
adw 17y ago
Scrivener is terrific: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html. I've written book-length stuff in Emacs/LaTeX before, and I might go back to that for typesetting, but I'd write in Scrivener.
- Hagelin 17y ago
  Using MultiMarkdown in Scrivener and then generating LaTeX works pretty well for me, though I haven't written anything book-length with it. http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/using_multimarkdown_with_scriv/ http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/using_multimarkdown_...
plesn 17y ago
Do I understand well : is this something similar to what would be a good GUI for reStructuredText ? (I don't have OS X anymore to try it, unfortunately)

36 points by crux 17y ago

This is really cool. There are a lot of areas where the state of the art really is Word and Excel. For some use cases, a horizontal application is perfectly adequate. However, all the rest are opportunities for enterprising hackers.

zitterbewegung 17y ago
I actually made a poetry book in LaTeX. It wasn't THAT hard.

Locke1689 17y ago

Pretty cool. I do have to say that I prefer LaTeX though. If you're not into writing LaTeX you may want to try LyX (http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/). It's a WYSIWYM LaTeX editor for Windows and UNIX-like (including OS X). Heh, although when I say "Ulysses" out loud it makes me think "useless."

cstross 17y ago
Apples and oranges. LaTeX is a formatter. (Actually a full-blown interpreter, but it's generally used for producing typeset text output from command files.) Ulysses and Scrivener are an utterly different class of application; they're used for composition and editing of complex compound documents, with an emphasis on managing the structure (e.g. they both make it utterly trivial to change the order of chapters in a book, swap subsections within a chapter, write the text with no distractions, or mess around with the outline). LyX is, effectively, a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX (that is handicapped by not being flexible enough to generate arbitrary LaTeX documents, and so it tends to be restricted to using a set range of LaTeX templates). Might as well be comparing motorcycles and ro-ro ferries. Finally: parading your lack of knowledge of classical mythology or modernist literature really doesn't do you any favours.
- crux 17y ago
  It also bears mentioning that both Scrivener and Ulysses have their own pretty powerful LaTeX export functions, though I haven't thoroughly used either one.
- Locke1689 17y ago
  First, thanks for the information. I didn't understand from the site that Ulysses is actually more of an organizational tool. It wasn't until I read this[1] review article that I understood that. However, you yourself made a few mistakes. Technically, LaTeX is not a formatter, it is a markup language for the TeX typesetting system. In addition, it is actually not an interpreter (in the same way that HTML is not an interpreter). LyX is, as I said, a WYSIWYM editor for LaTeX. It is also allows LaTeX insertion and imports, so it should be arbitrarily flexible, not handicapped. Finally: parading your lack of knowledge of classical mythology or modernist literature really doesn't do you any favours. Hmm. Actually I have read Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegans Wake, as well as the Odyssey. James Joyce is probably one of my picks for greatest authors who ever lived. My little remark was one of whimsy, commenting on a little phonetic wordplay, not an expression of ignorance. [1] http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/review/ulysses_is_a_heroic_writers_application/ http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/review/ulysses_is_a_heroic_wr...

petercooper 17y ago

Anyone here ready to earn some karma by vouching for it and giving a few paragraphs on why I absolutely must try this out? :-)

crux 17y ago
I can tell you why I like it. There's an app that's been repped for here called Scrivener, and like Scrivener (it predates Scr., actually), Ulysses is an application that is supposed to make writing large amounts of text more sane than standard word processors. It essentially combines elements of outliners and information managers with a composition interface. In general the UI for Ulysses is very thoroughly thought out, and somewhat idiosyncratic for that fact. Many people find it lacking or uncomfortable in one way or another, but I can tell you that every element of the UI has been considered and applied to fulfill the designers' very specific goal. One of those UI values is that it's very semantically correct. There's no formatting at all, except auto-formatting that you define yourself, which will recognize plaintext tags. The way this shakes out is that I will write a sentence like this: The &&quick&& brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. And then define a tag called 'emphasis', which is formed by a '&&' wrap, and displays itself in a certain way depending on whether it's being viewed in a window, fullscreen, printed, et cetera. If you are a fan of working in plaintext and you are interested in more structured ways to write long-form text, I think it's a great program. EDIT: changed example markup to something more exotic for HN's own parser
- derefr 17y ago
  You seem to know writing tools, so: if I already have a composition interface I prefer—OmmWriter, in my case—what would be a good pure outliner/information manager to act as a complement to it? Preferably not a data silo; I push all my actual writing to Github with each revision, so a plaintext format that could come along for the ride and wouldn't require a special viewer would be nice.
  - crux 17y ago
    I'm not sure I fully understand, but if by 'not a data silo' you mean you're ok with having an application to view these things, but prefer that they be stored as real files, rather than a flat database, I strongly recommend EagleFiler. No one of its features is very shiny or mindblowing as the NLP of DEVONthink, for instance, but it's very well thought out and efficient. In particular I think it has the best 'capture' function for taking the frontmost document from the current application and saving it to the EF database (which consists of an index file as well as a regular Finder-friendly file hierarchy)

jmatt 17y ago

Ok so after I decided that it was interesting and cool, my first thought was, "What's the emacs-mode for Ulysses?". I couldn't find one so it looks like I may have to actually download and install it. Anyone know of similar emacs or vim modes for writing?

vorador 17y ago
A lot of features seem to overlap with org-mode.
crux 17y ago
I don't know of any such vim mode but I'd be very interested to hear about it. The closest I have is a script that turns on things like wrap-by-word and scroll-by-visual-line (given that in prose, what vim thinks of as lines, we think of as paragraphs)

grinich 17y ago

Writeroom is pretty great too. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom

Hagelin 17y ago
It's even better when combined with QuickCursor (free download), which allows you to, with a keystroke, edit the contents of almost any textfield in WriteRoom. It also works with other editors such as TextMate. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/ http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/

adw 17y ago

Scrivener is terrific: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html. I've written book-length stuff in Emacs/LaTeX before, and I might go back to that for typesetting, but I'd write in Scrivener.

Hagelin 17y ago
Using MultiMarkdown in Scrivener and then generating LaTeX works pretty well for me, though I haven't written anything book-length with it. http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/using_multimarkdown_with_scriv/ http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/using_multimarkdown_...

plesn 17y ago

Do I understand well : is this something similar to what would be a good GUI for reStructuredText ? (I don't have OS X anymore to try it, unfortunately)