It’s not that don’t get distracted while writing - I do - but having a “focused” writing mode isn’t enough to stop me from straying from my task (my Pomodoro app does a better job in disciplining me!).Īdmittedly, this looks like a pretty wacky work-flow: I keep notes in nvAlt (and clean them up using Byword, which has better search and replace functions), write in Ulysses (sometimes making additional notes or corrections in Daedalus on my iPad), do more editing in MultiMarkdown Composer, do final edits in WordPress, and save the relevant posts for future writing in Scrivener. I’ve never had much interest in “non-distraction” writing options. But after trying this out, it struck me as unnecessary: it’s simpler just to have nvAlt running while I’m writing and drag text over as I need it. I’d also been attracted to Ulysses because of its ability to access my nvAlt notes: there’s an “External Sources” section of the “Library” bar on the left that synchronizes with my nvAlt folder on DropBox. From my limited experience with it (I’ve used it for a couple of weeks), Ulysses seems to do the best job of exporting footnotes into HTML (I had a few problems with Scrivener), though I usually do another round of editing using MultiMarkdown Composer to make sure everything looks right before the exporting the HTML file. I’d been playing around with different options for doing the initial drafts of the posts (which tend to run long) and had been experimenting with Byword and, more recently, with Scrivener, both of which can export HTML files, which I would then paste into the WordPress editing window (I do the final edits in WordPress itself). What ultimately sold me on Ulysses was its handling of footnotes: it’s simple (invoking the footnote command gives you a pop-up window in which you can fill in the reference), it’s clean (click the window and it goes away), and they work.įootnotes mattered to me because, earlier this year I’d started a research blog where I try to work out certain issues in the history of ideas that are relevant for the writing I’m doing in Scrivener. I already owned Daedalus, Ulysses’ companion app for the iPad but had never been able to figure out what to do with it (or understood why it wasn’t named “Telemachus” - he, after all, was Ulysses’ son and Daedalus crashed, which does not exactly inspire confidence in the app’s stability). It seemed, at best, like a stripped-down version of Scrivener, which I use for most of my writing. Some other apps are more restrictive in this respect and while the point is to keep writing simple, I find it useful for instance to be able to use my favorite editor font (Courier New) with appropriate line-spacing. On a related note, what I also found very handy is that Ulysses allows you to change the editor font/line spacing/line width for both the regular and full screen editing mode. What is especially nice is that you can freely configure these visual clues to your liking. These visual clues make multimarkdown text even easier to read. The same is true for headlines, lists etc. So when you enter **important**, Ulysess does make it bold automatically. The second important feature, which makes Ulysses convenient to use is that it stylizes multimarkdown text. ![]() It offers some novel features which, quite paradoxically, will enhance your minimalistic writing experience.įor one thing, Ulysses has a Library of “sheets”, similarly to Scrivener, so you do not need to save and switch between individual documents, but you can simply click on a “sheet” to edit. If you are looking for a somewhat more sophisticated solution, I recommend that you check out Ulysses by the Soulmen. Aleh mentioned in one of his earlier post that he was using Byword and of course there are a number of other lightweight apps for writing up ideas in a no-distraction manner (e.g., iAWriter, Writeroom). This is just a short note for those who may be relying on Multimarkdown documents at some point in there writing workflow.
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