Home Screen Hero
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
If you’re a writer of any kind—a blogger, a copywriter, an aspiring novelist, or any other type of word wrestler—you’ll know how important your writing tools can be. In the analog world, I will only write seriously with a very nice pen and cream paper. And in the digital domain, I write exclusively in Ulysses.
What is Ulysses and how much does it cost?
Ulysses lets you get words out of your brain and onto the page exceptionally quickly and easily, and features a distraction-free interface that hides everything you don’t need so you can focus on your words.
It’s incredibly fast. And it allows you to manage even very large projects. I’m currently writing another book with it, and use it daily for business writing, news reporting, and small bits like writing author biographies, questions for events I host, and recording things I want to remember later.
It’s great on Mac and on an iPad with an external keyboard, and there’s also an iPhone version so you can access, edit, and jot down ideas on the go.
Ulysses isn’t free, but it’s pretty cheap: $39.99/£39.99 (around AU$60) for an annual plan or £5.99/$5.99 per month (around AU$9 per month). Students can also pick it up for $10.99 / £9.99 (which is around AU$17) for six months currently.
Why this is my home screen hero
Ulysses is a write-once, publish-anywhere app. It uses Markdown, a form of plain text with simple shortcuts to quickly format, link and structure documents. Markdown was also designed with speed in mind.
Because the most common shortcuts are all keyboard-based – one pound symbol to turn text into an H1 heading, two for H2, Command-B for bold, etc. – this means I’m not constantly moving to the mouse, which my RSI hands are very happy about.
Because Markdown is plain text, there is very little stress on your system. Ulysses is therefore incredibly fast, even on old Macs. Searching even large folders is instantaneous, and these plain text files can be opened in just about any text application as well as from Ulysses.
Once you’ve written your words, you can export them to just about anything with just a few clicks: to blogging and newsletter platforms like WordPress, Ghost, Substack, and Medium; in the clipboard as plain or rich text; in Microsoft DOCX format; in plain text, rich text or Markdown format; in HTML format; in PDF format; or in ePub form.
There are many templates you can use to format these file types. So, for example, if I export in DOCX format, I can opt for a simple and clear template; a film script; a newspaper-style column layout and much more. And there are many themes you can use to customize Ulysses’ appearance. You can also change the interface to light mode, dark mode, or a mix of both: I like my sidebars to be dark and my editing window to be light.
How I use Ulysses
Three alternative writing apps for serious matters
Scrivener (Mac/PC/iOS)
I’ve used Scrivener for very heavy projects, including self-publishing a novel. It’s overkill for everyday writing, I think, but it’s a powerful application for book production.
Highland 2 (Mac)
This is a wonderful and very beautiful Mac application for writing screenplays and scripts, and it was created by Big fish And Frankenweenie the writer John August.
AI Writer (Mac/PC/iOS)
Like Ulysses, IA Writer is a distraction-free, Markdown-based writing environment. It is even more minimalist than Ulysses and provides visual writing and a return to style.
The main interface consists of a main editing window and three sidebars that you can hide or show. The sidebar on the far left is where I organize my projects and folders – so, for example, I write this in my “Mags Etc > TechRadar” folder. It’s a small thing, I know, but I like that I can also customize the sidebar icons and colors.
You can also use folders to divide projects. For example, if you’re working on a book, you might have separate folders to store your research, the stories and inspirations for your characters, or images of possible locations, as well as the chapters you’re writing. You can also link to external folders on your device or in the cloud.
To the right of the first sidebar, there are previews of all the other documents in the current folder, so I can see (and sort or filter) all my other recent TechRadar items. The main window shows my words and current word count, because that’s all I need for most writing jobs.
And the right sidebar shows me more stats and can be edited to show progress toward a word count or deadline, the outline of my current document, images I’m using in the document, or links I’ve added.
Why I recommend Ulysses
To borrow Apple’s slogan: it “works” (although a little slowly when it comes to syncing on my iPad and iPhone).
I’ve tried many writing apps – going back to the days of WordStar and WordPerfect – and Ulysses is one that feels like it was designed just for me. Not too simple, not too complex, not too demanding, and doesn’t risk destroying tens of thousands of words and making them unrecoverable like a certain app that rhymes with “Nicrosoft Bird” once did.
The only real downside to using Ulysses for work documents is that part of my job involves managing tracked comments and edits, and Ulysses isn’t designed to do that with third parties: you can comment on your documents and projects quite easily, but I haven’t found a way to introduce, say, a client’s heavily edited Word document.
So I always keep a copy of Word – but Ulysses is the app I use 99% of the time for fiction, non-fiction, business and corporate work.
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