Notebooks as a Ulysses replacement

Posted by Hugh
Aug 20, 2017 at 09:10 PM

Doesn’t Ulysses have one or two key characteristics which any potential replacement ought to match or exceed?

There seem to me to be at least two such characteristics. They are: its facility to allow “chunks” of text to be quickly and easily re-arranged within the whole, and its feature enabling relatively straightforward export or “compilation” of the text in a wide variety of styles and formats. Those two features make it particularly attractive if you’re engaged in writing medium- or long-form work (and these plainly provide reasons for novelist David Hewson’s fondness for it). And it has other features which also support this type of writing.

Notebooks is of course, as its name suggests, primarily a note-taking application (and it’s a very good one). In other words, it’s an application primarily designed for writing and managing short-form text. Of course, there’s potential for cross-over between Notebooks and Ulysses: in the past I’ve certainly read of some users deploying Ulysses when Notebooks or its rivals might seem the more obvious tool, and I’m sure the opposite is also true. I’m sure that you could write “War and Peace” in Notebooks - but you could also do so in countless applications. But if you want software that will match Ulysses’ attributes as closely as possible, it seems to me that Notebooks will leave you somewhat disappointed.