Ulysses' Companions' Odyssey (provisional app review)

Posted by Amontillado
Apr 20, 2022 at 11:11 PM

I have fond memories of Ulysses. Scrivener was my first foray into a writing studio application. It was great, but it lacked styles back in Version 2.

When Version 3 came out, I found I didn’t like some details of Scrivener’s styles. For instance, the no-style style. The three different editors (main window, copyholder, and quick reference editors) each have somewhat different capabilities. I recognize I’m being nit-picky.

Compiling is a great thing in Scrivener. However, most of what I need from the compile process I can do by swapping style libraries in Nisus, the more so in Mellel, since it supports page styles, and that’s a lot simpler than compiling in Scrivener.

Markdown was already on my radar. Ulysses seemed to be just what I was looking for - and then I got nit-picky again. At that time you couldn’t create separate Ulysses files. Everything went in one data store. I’m not keen on the cloud, either.

That led me back to where I’d started. Conventional word processors plus more Markdown than I used to do.

Macs, by the way, are excellent tools. If they ceased to exist I’d return to a Linux-centric life. Windows, only under duress. :-)