4 ms·
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 applic
by 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 agoYou 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 agoI'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)
- joe_the_user 17y agoWhat is a "composition editor?" or for that matter, an "information manager"?
- crux 17y agoI don't know what a composition editor is. But an information manager is, generally, one of the wide range of applications that take unstructured, file-like data and provide an application interface to them. What that entails varies, but there's often indexing (and powerful search), tagging, and sometimes NLP–a snippets manager, or a PIM like Eaglefiler, Together, Yojimbo, DEVONthink and many many more. EDIT: You might mean, "what's a composition interface?" In which case it's a text-editor component, with some added UI sugar like current line highlighting, word count, splitting, typewriting scrolling, full-screen mode, et cetera. You know, an interface for composing text.
- joe_the_user 17y agoGoogling, I think a "composition interface" is an interface like Ommwriter, which shows a screen blank except for your words to allow you to write without distraction. Seems like this could be a plugin for a standard wordprocessor but some people like software dood-dads like this the way other people kitchen dood-dads like lettuce dryers.
- randallsquared 17y agoThere's no formatting at all, except auto-formatting that you define yourself, which will recognize plaintext tags. So you could define markdown in it? I googled a bit, and only found people wishing you could, so maybe there's something I'm missing.
- crux 17y agoWell, Markdown is a script for converting into HTML, which is far beyond the abilities of Ulysses. But Ulysses does have both inline and paragraph styling, so it would be trivial to replicate Markdown's functionality like italics, strong, headers, et cetera. It doesn't literally do HTML, though, so I wouldn't try to, say, plug it directly into a Markdown processor in a blog. It's designed for producing manuscripts, which it can do in several formats, including LaTeX.
- randallsquared 17y agoMarkdown is both a specific script and a format, and in this context I meant the format... that is, turning asterisk-surrounded text into emphasized text, etc. HTML is just an implementation detail. :)