In choosing between IA Writer and Ulysses, what features do you value in your choice? (Leaving the sub out of the discussion for the sake of evaluating quality matters).

iA Writer and Ulysses are apples and oranges. iA is a very competent markdown editor. Ulysses is more of writing environment that incorporates a good editor. If you're writing long form, or a paper, or even a book, Ulysses is the place for that because of its library and file management.

I agree with Paul. If you've tried both and are still unsure of the differences, then you're probably not using those extended features of Ulysses that Paul references, which means you're probably better off with iA Writer since it is cheaper.

For longform writing I value my own choice of fonts and background colors, which is why I mainly stopped using IA Writer years ago. I purchased the IA apps in 2017 ($9.99 for the Mac app, $3.99 for the iOS app) and made good use of them for a long time. But I do not like the binary choice of light or dark theme, nor the restriction to their idiosyncratic allowance of only three embedded fonts of their own making. The devs made these restrictive choices on purpose, and they've lost some sales because of it.

Indeed, IA is so hamstrung by their own font limitation that they utilize their own proprietary (yet generic) serif and sans serif fonts on their own website, which they refuse to allow to be used in their app.

Otherwise IA Writer is good at what it does. I find that for Markdown, for me Drafts beats IA Writer on Mac/iOS in most ways. It's more robust, it feels faster, it comes free, and the unlocked version let you choose from multiple themes.

For just writing text on Mac I've used BBEdit for literally decades. Rock-solid, fast, with excellent GREP search/replace. It's another app that can be used for free, and if you aren't coding you probably don't need to pay for it. (I do anyway.) And it is infinitely flexible in your choice of fonts and colors for... everything.

My main longform writing app is Ulysses. As others have mentioned it's quite different from IA Writer.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I agree with Paul. If you've tried both and are still unsure of the differences, then you're probably not using those extended features of Ulysses that Paul references, which means you're probably better off with iA Writer since it is cheaper.

The expense is not really an issue. I don’t mind paying for a product to be produced and maintained. I am more afraid of the continuous development and expectations that follow a sub. Customers start demanding new features, etc., making the product into something else (becoming sluggier and bloated). This is one of the things I value about IA; its rather strict philosophy on what it is.

I'd say its the contrary. Without reliable recurrent subscription revenue devs are starved of funding, and if anything they need to bank new features to have ready when preparing releases in order to justify upgrade prices. (Something seen for decades under the upgrade model.) The 'strict philosophy' of IA is partly due to the necessarily small size of the company and its limitations on what it can do, at least as much as it insists on an austere interface.

Ulysses has been a subscription-based app since 2017. I think your fears about bloat are misplaced.

samuels wrote:

Customers start demanding new features, etc., making the product into something else (becoming sluggier and >bloated). This is one of the things I value about IA; its rather strict philosophy on what it is.

This assertion seems far afield of the original question in this thread, and irrelevant. Ulysses has been around 20+ years. I've used it most of that time. The developers evolve features slowly, which I admire, for stability and trustworthiness. iA Writer's devs do the same.

Paul Korm wrote:

This assertion seems far afield of the original question in this thread, and irrelevant. Ulysses has been around 20+ years. I've used it most of that time. The developers evolve features slowly, which I admire, for stability and trustworthiness. iA Writer's devs do the same.

I agree. I was trying to point out that there are other sides of a subscription model that make me hesitant.

iA Writer is very pleasant to use and I like the Wordpress publish feature.

It is not without rough edges. It can crash. I've never lost work, and it happens when I'm fiddling with its locations.

BBEdit is very useful even if it doesn't publish to Wordpress. It gets close, though, since you can open/edit/save files on ftp servers as if they were local files.

I still like BBEdit's Notebook mode, in which one file presents as multiple subdocuments. That's not unlike iA Writer's library, if I'm getting the terminology right - iA Writer's list of files in a location.

Ulysses worked well for me long ago, but at the time it didn't have good support for documents outside its common storage area. I should probably give it another look. Like iA Writer, writing in Ulysses is a very nice experience.

Amontillado wrote:

BBEdit is very useful even if it doesn't publish to Wordpress. It gets close, though, since you can open/edit/save files on ftp servers as if they were local files.

As noted over the years (I think MadaboutDana first wrote about it here in 2017), MWeb (subscription or purchase) is a fantastic Markdown app for Mac & iOS which also lets you publish to Wordpress (as well as Ghost, Tumblr, Medium and others). It's highly tweakable and themeable, has excellent built-in image uploading and management, and has a Visual UI for categories, tags, and slugs.

https://www.mweb.im/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mweb-markdown-writing-notes/id1183407767

I don't blog, however, and I tend to reach for Drafts for quick notes and Markdown.

https://getdrafts.com/

MWeb is designed as a traditional document editor with built-in publishing menus but Drafts is built around "Actions." While it doesn't have a permanent "Sync to WordPress" button by default, you use (or create) an action to send your text to your site. (They have a Drafts Action Directory where you can install a pre-made WordPress action.) But using Drafts would be more complex and cumbersome as a Wordpress publishing platform.

It's just my favored environment for quick text/Markdown writing.

Is it inconceivable, though, given iA’s library feature, to write longer pieces in it?

samuels wrote:

Is it inconceivable, though, given iA’s library feature, to write longer pieces in it?

It's conceivable to write War and Peace with TextEdit on an MacBook.

iA Writer supports transclusion with its "content blocks" feature, so long pieces could be constructed from multiple files without a lot of effort. If you want a more customizable print option then use Marked 2 alongside iA Writer and your customer CSS in Marked 2. Marked 2 supports iA Writer's content block transclusion. The combo of these two apps can approximate some of Ulysses' features.

That's interesting – I'd forgotten all about iA Writer's transclusion feature. Obsidian can do the same thing, of course...

iA Writer supports transclusion with its "content blocks" feature, so long pieces could be constructed from multiple files without a lot of effort. If you want a more customizable print option then use Marked 2 alongside iA Writer and your customer CSS in Marked 2. Marked 2 supports iA Writer's content block transclusion. The combo of these two apps can approximate some of Ulysses' features.

Transclusion and concatenation are features of truly thoughtful writing environments, especially those that facilitate (and encourage) granular writing. That is, it is helpful to be able to break your writing into small chunks, but it is also necessary to be able to read those individual chunks as one long piece so you can measure the flow of the text from one chunk to another. Scrivener and Ulysses make this fairly easy. I haven't text iA Writer.

Nice - I'm going to have to check that out.

I wish vendors were more up front with where data is stored. MWeb has a library feature that relieves the user from worrying about file names or locations, but I didn't see on the MWeb site where the library is stored.

There's a two week trial, so I can self-rescue on questions like that.

It looks nice.

satis wrote:

As noted over the years (I think MadaboutDana first wrote about it here in 2017), MWeb (subscription or purchase) is a fantastic Markdown app for Mac & iOS which also lets you publish to Wordpress (as well as Ghost, Tumblr, Medium and others). It's highly tweakable and themeable, has excellent built-in image uploading and management, and has a Visual UI for categories, tags, and slugs.

https://www.mweb.im/

I didn't see on the MWeb site where the library is stored.

If you store the Mweb database on the local machine, you can see the location referenced in Settings, and find it in the filesystem here:

~/Library/Containers/MWeb/Data/Documents/MWebLibrary

iA Writer content block syntax is

/filename.ext

Obsidian's transclusion syntax is

![[filemane]]

Absolutely. I remain on the lookout for promising writing apps that can do this, or do what Scrivener and Ulysses do (concatenate multiple notes/documents in a single view). Sadly, the only really simple writing app on macOS that used to do this was Novellus, but that's now disappeared from the Mac App Store – nice little piece of software with a rather good grammar/style checker attached, plus a minimal footprint.

But if you're happy to use transclusion, Obsidian is definitely your friend. I've rather fallen out of love with iA Writer, because it's just a bit too minimalist...

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Transclusion and concatenation are features of truly thoughtful writing environments, especially those that facilitate (and encourage) granular writing. That is, it is helpful to be able to break your writing into small chunks, but it is also necessary to be able to read those individual chunks as one long piece so you can measure the flow of the text from one chunk to another. Scrivener and Ulysses make this fairly easy. I haven't text iA Writer.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Sadly, the only really simple writing app on macOS that used to do this was Novellus, but that's now disappeared from the Mac App Store

NovellusSoftware seems to have shut down; perhaps it's pivoted to https://novellusai.com/

Alfons Schmid's Notebooks, discussed recently in another thread, has a compile/concatenate engine that lets you toggle a Combined View of a selected folder or multiple docs, and stitches them into one long scroll for reading or editing. It also lets you use your own folders instead of a proprietary or hidden database.

Storyist, which I have only played with, feels much more like a traditional word processor. It treats chapters and scenes as separate items in a sidebar and naturally scrolls from one scene into the next, so it sort of concatenates. It also has a decent integrated outlining tool (in addition to writer-sprecific tools like corkboard/scene index cards). It's mainly designed to be a simpler but more modern and robust competitor to Scrivener, whose development has largely stalled in recent years and is apparently problematic for some Windows users. (I own Scrivener but for various reasons I dislike it, and I'm always on the lookout for something better than Ulysses.)

That's a point – I'd forgotten that Notebooks can concatenate. Thanks for reminding me!