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Writing is a challenging endeavor that involves many stages – planning, research, drafting, revising, editing and publishing. To smoothly navigate this process from start to finish, you need a writing tool that provides a focused environment along with the right features to stay organized and productive.
For many serious writers, especially those in the Apple ecosystem, Ulysses has become the app of choice. Since its initial release in 2013, Ulysses has evolved into a comprehensive writing environment that aims to provide everything you need to take your projects from initial concept to final published work.
As a writer who has used Ulysses extensively over the past few years, I‘ve found it to be an invaluable tool that has helped me stay on track and complete writing projects more efficiently than ever before. In this in-depth review, I‘ll share my experiences using the app, break down its key features, and help you determine if it‘s the right writing solution for your needs.
An Interface Designed for Writing
One of Ulysses‘ biggest strengths is its clean, uncluttered interface that‘s optimized for the writing process. Upon launching the app, you‘re greeted with a simple three-pane layout:
- The left pane houses your library, which contains all your writing projects organized into groups (folders).
- The middle pane displays a list of "sheets" (documents) within the selected group.
- The right pane is your writing area, where you‘ll spend most of your time.
There are no distracting toolbars, rulers, complex menus or other interface elements vying for your attention. Just a serene, text-focused space for you to write in. If you want to enter distraction-free mode, you can easily hide the library and sheet list with a single click.
Everything about Ulysses‘ interface is designed to keep you focused on your words. The app uses a customized version of Markdown for text formatting. With Markdown, you use simple characters to style text – for example, wrapping a word with asterisks to make it bold. This allows you to apply formatting without taking your hands off the keyboard or fiddling with menus.
I‘ve found this minimalist approach highly conducive to productivity. It‘s so easy to get into a state of flow when using Ulysses. The minimal interface helps me forget about the app and just focus on translating my thoughts into words on the screen. Over time, the Markdown commands have become second nature, allowing me to format on the fly without breaking my concentration.
Of course, Ulysses offers a variety of themes, color schemes, and typography options to customize the writing environment to your liking. But the core interface remains uncluttered and tailored to the writing experience. I appreciate how I can simply open the app and start writing immediately without friction.
Keeping Your Writing Organized
Another area where Ulysses shines is its approach to organizing your writing. The app uses a system of groups, sheets, and filters to keep your projects tidy and easy to navigate.
Groups function like folders, allowing you to organize your sheets in a way that makes sense for your writing. For example, I have top-level groups for my areas of focus – Reviews, Essays, Newsletter, etc. – and then subgroups to further categorize those projects.
Sheets are essentially documents, but Ulysses takes a unique approach. Rather than treating a writing project as one long document, Ulysses encourages you to break it up into discrete sections which become separate sheets. So for this review, I have sheets for the intro, interface, organization, and other sections.
This approach makes it much easier to navigate and rearrange long-form content. I can focus on writing or editing one section at a time, view my overall progress at a glance, and quickly move sections around by dragging and dropping sheets.
Filters add another powerful layer of organization. They essentially function as smart groups, showing you sheets that match certain criteria. For example, I have filters that display sheets with specific keywords I‘ve attached, like "Draft," "Editing," or "Ready to Publish." This allows me to instantly view all my sheets that are at a particular stage without having to hunt through my group hierarchy.
Ulysses also makes it easy to find older content with its robust search features. You can quickly locate sheets by name with the Quick Open panel, run searches within the text of your current sheet, or even perform advanced searches across your entire library filtering by keywords, text, and other attributes.
With groups, sheets, filters and searches, Ulysses provides a highly flexible and intuitive system for organizing writing projects of all sizes. I‘ve found it indispensable for keeping on top of the 50+ articles and posts I have in progress at any given time. No matter how many sheets I add to my library, I‘m always able to find what I need quickly.
Writing Goals & Statistics
For many writers, myself included, setting goals and tracking progress is crucial for staying motivated and productive. Ulysses offers excellent support for this with its writing goals and statistics features.
Writing goals allow you to set word count or character count targets for your sheets and groups. I religiously set a word count goal for every article I write. When I‘m working, a small circle in the upper right shows my live progress towards that goal. It starts empty, slowly fills up, and turns green when I‘ve reached my target. If I go over my goal, the circle turns red.
This simple visual feedback has a surprisingly strong motivating effect. Watching that progress circle grow is highly satisfying and keeps me pushing forward. It gamifies the writing process in a subtle way. I find myself writing more just to see the circle turn green and feel that small sense of accomplishment.
For longer projects like books or theses, Ulysses also supports deadlines. You set your desired completion date and total word count goal, and Ulysses will automatically calculate writing targets to keep you on track, telling you how many words you need to write each day to finish on time. It‘s a great way to break down an intimidating project into manageable daily chunks.
In addition to goals, Ulysses offers robust writing statistics. At any time, you can view live stats like character, word, and sentence counts, reading time, and more for your current sheet, group, or selection. It will even show you detailed visual breakdowns of your word counts and writing habits over time. As a data nerd, I find these insights both fascinating and motivating.
Flexible Export & Publishing Options
Getting your finished work out of Ulysses and into the hands of your readers or editors is refreshingly straightforward. The app offers a wide range of file formats and publishing options for every common writing scenario.
If you‘re collaborating with others, you can export your sheets to industry standard formats like Microsoft Word, PDF, or rich text, complete with customizable style sheets to control the look of your exported file. I frequently export articles to Word for my editors to mark up with comments and changes.
For publishing blog posts or web content, Ulysses can export clean HTML, full HTML pages, or Markdown files. Even better, the app integrates directly with WordPress, Medium, and Ghost, allowing you to publish your sheets as new posts or pages straight from the app. I publish dozens of WordPress posts directly from Ulysses every month and it‘s a huge timesaver.
Ulysses is also great for publishing ebooks. The app can export groups of sheets to EPUB and PDF files with a variety of style options suitable for digital book formats. I haven‘t published any ebooks myself, but I‘ve seen authors use Ulysses to publish impressive looking ebooks with minimal effort.
Of course, you can also simply copy your sheet text to the clipboard for pasting into any other app. With the breadth of Ulysses‘ export and publishing features, it‘s rare that I ever encounter a scenario it can‘t handle. No matter what the final destination is for my writing, I can almost always get it there directly from Ulysses.
Device Sync & Mobile Functionality
These days, many writers (again, myself included) like to work on multiple devices. We might do most of our heavy lifting on a Mac, but also jot down ideas or make quick edits on an iPhone or iPad as needed. Ulysses handles multi-device workflows seamlessly.
The app syncs your entire library across Mac, iPhone, and iPad using iCloud. Groups, sheets, and even images and PDFs added to your sheets using Ulysses‘ attachment features stay perfectly in sync. I can start a draft on my iMac, write a few more paragraphs on my iPad at a coffee shop, then do some final edits on my iPhone before publishing, and it all just works.
I‘m especially impressed by the feature parity between the Mac and iOS versions of Ulysses. The writing experience is remarkably consistent across devices, with the same core features and design language throughout. Using Ulysses on an iPad with an external keyboard is just as powerful and fluid as using it on a Mac. Even on a tiny iPhone screen, the app is thoughtfully optimized and can be used for significant writing and editing.
Having such a strong mobile complement to the desktop app is a major point in Ulysses‘ favor. It means I can take full advantage of every spare minute to move my writing projects forward, no matter where I am or what device I have at hand. With Ulysses, I can always make meaningful progress, even if I only have my phone and five minutes to spare.
Pricing & Value
Ulysses has adopted a subscription pricing model, which has been a point of contention for some users. The app costs $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year, and a subscription unlocks access to the app on all your supported devices.
As someone who happily pays for software that makes me more productive, I consider Ulysses to be well worth the price. The app has become an indispensable daily tool in my writing workflow. It‘s not an exaggeration to say that Ulysses has changed the way I approach writing for the better and helped me take my output to a new level.
When I consider the cumulative time savings and productivity gains I‘ve realized with Ulysses, not to mention the reduction in friction and frustration compared to wrangling MS Word or juggling separate apps for notes, drafts and publishing, $50 a year feels like a bargain.
That said, I understand the subscription fatigue many consumers are feeling, and a recurring fee for a writing app will be a big ask for some users, especially those who only write occasionally. Ulysses does offer a 14-day free trial, so you can test it out thoroughly before committing to a subscription. Students can also get a discounted price of $10.99 for six months.
Is Ulysses Right For You?
Ulysses is unabashedly aimed at serious writers who are looking to upgrade their writing workflow with a professional tool. If you write regularly, want a clean, friction-free interface, and value the ability to organize lots of documents and projects in one place, Ulysses is well worth considering.
However, there are a few potential downsides to be aware of:
- Ulysses is exclusively available for Apple devices. If you use Windows or Android, it‘s a non-starter.
- There‘s no getting around the subscription pricing. If you‘re strongly opposed to subscriptions for productivity software, Ulysses probably isn‘t for you.
- Ulysses uses Markdown for formatting by default. If you need complex layout options or prefer traditional rich text formatting, it may not be the best fit.
- While Ulysses offers a solid feature set, it‘s not quite as powerful as dedicated long-form writing apps like Scrivener when it comes to organizing research notes and reference materials.
If those aren‘t dealbreakers for you, I wouldn‘t hesitate to recommend giving Ulysses a try. In my experience, its particular blend of an uncluttered interface, flexible organizational features, and useful writing tools is unmatched. The more I use it, the more I appreciate how thoughtfully its feature set maps to the realities of the writing process.
Worthy Alternatives to Ulysses
Ulysses may be one of the most popular writing apps for Apple devices, but it‘s certainly not the only option. Here are a few worthy alternatives to consider:
- Scrivener ($49): Scrivener is a powerful writing app that‘s especially popular with novelists and academic writers. It beats Ulysses when it comes to organizing background research and reference materials. Unlike Ulysses, Scrivener charges a one-time fee rather than a subscription and has a Windows version.
- iA Writer ($29.99): If you like the idea of a Markdown-based writing environment but want something simpler and cheaper than Ulysses, check out iA Writer. It has a stripped down feature set and elegant interface. There are versions for Mac, iOS, Windows and Android.
- Bear (Free, $1.49/month): Bear is an Evernote-style note-taking app with a beautiful, Markdown-friendly interface and great tagging features. While not as full-featured as Ulysses, it‘s a nice option for shorter form writing. There‘s no Windows version, though.
- Typed ($29.99): Typed is a relatively new entry in the category of minimalist Markdown writing apps. It has an extremely clean, opinionated interface, and is laser-focused on the core writing experience.
Ultimately, the right writing app for you depends on your specific needs, preferences and budget. But if you‘re an Apple user ready to upgrade to a professional writing environment, Ulysses should be at the top of your list to try. Its thoughtful design and robust feature set make it an absolute pleasure to use for all kinds of writing projects.
Personally, I can‘t imagine reverting to MS Word or a basic text editor after experiencing the benefits of Ulysses. It‘s made me a more efficient, organized and productive writer, and has earned a permanent place in my toolkit. If you do give it a spin, I‘d love to hear about your experience!