Plain Text Enhanced

By now you should have noticed “all these funny characters” before headlines and within the text. You should also have noticed “these colored bubbles”, and wondered how they found their way into this otherwise format-free introduction.

You may even have marveled at how nice everything looks, how beautiful the text is set, how headlines are outdented and lists indented, and how all this is possible without using fancy formatting palettes, rulers and font panels. And, ultimately, what it all means, what it’s good for, and why you should care.

We believe that writers should not be bothered with layout tasks. At the very least, layout tasks should never interfere with the writing process itself. Call it what you will — distraction-free, zen-like, purely semantic, mini minimal, neo retro —, fact is that content creation is best kept separate from presentation, or else the latter will get in the way. Eventually. By design (pun, sorry).

Ulysses uses so-called minimal markup to define, not format or style, text passages. The full list of available definitions is accessible via CMD-9, and it should have you covered left to right. From headlines to lists, to images and footnotes, you simply assign meaning to text passages by entering some easy to remember shortcuts.

Need a title? Create a title.

Need a quote?

Create a quote.

Need a footnote? Create one.¹ No need to reach for your mouse, just type. Just. Type.

360 degree semantics

Now for the fun part: Ulysses can output your writing to a host of standard formats, such as Plain Text, RTF, Word, HTML ePub and even PDF. It does so by translating your plain text input based on the definition of the minimal markup. If your brain starts to hurt, here’s a simple example…

Let’s assume you want to emphasize a text passage. You select the word “emphasize” (do so), and press the keyboard shortcut CMD-I. Notice the extra characters that were entered around the word.

You have just told Ulysses, in its own “plain text language”, that this passage should be an emphasized passage. Now Ulysses knows and will never forget. So when you export your text to, say, RTF, Ulysses will translate this emphasized passage into what RTF understands — in this case, it will format your emphasized passage as italicized text. If you export to HTML, Ulysses will translate the passage to semantically correct <em>.

Headlines such as this will get a larger font in RTF and will be tagged with <h2> in HTML.

And so on.

The beauty of this should be obvious by now: Instead of worrying about how your output looks, you can concentrate on what your content is supposed to mean. This may be frightening at first, but trust us, it’s not.

It’s awesome.

Attachments, Notes & Comments

There’s a bar atop every sheet which is called the “attachment bar”. Attachments allow you to place arbitrary content next to your not-so arbitrary main content: images, text notes and keywords. Keywords are especially nice, since you can set up filters which will look for these keywords.

Images and text notes can be attached multiple times, and all attachments can be torn off and placed anywhere onscreen. You can even zoom into images, flip through PDFs and use most markup within text notes.

Another way to add notes is to create annotations or inline comments. Comments can also span entire paragraphs.

By Popover Demand

As you have seen, most of Ulysses’ advanced features are tucked away in small popovers. That way, they remain invisible unless you really need them. Most popovers can be torn-off and turned into always-on floating HUDs for quick reference and/or direct access. They make a good fit for a second monitor by the way.

And while some popovers are only available from within the editor, others can also be called in the sidebars. As an example, you can invoke Quick Export via the contextual menu on groups or filters. You can also check text statistics that way.

Pro tip: Quick Export, Favorites and Navigator feature full keyboard navigation. So if you feel like a power user, try this…

Hit CMD-8

Use up/down arrow to navigate

Try to select this headline

No, this one

THIS ONE!!!

iCloud vs On My Mac

In “Overview”, it states:

if you have iCloud set up and enabled, Ulysses will store everything on Apple’s super-modern mega-clusters

Well, we lied. It’s completely up to you where things get stored, and you can freely move your texts from the cloud to local storage only and vice versa. As long as both options are enabled in preferences, that is:

Sidebar Settings set the Sidebar

Obviously, everything stored in “On My Mac” will no longer be available on all the other Macs you own and use, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, is it?

Integrating Daedalus Touch

If you own Daedalus Touch for iOS (and, frankly, you should), now is a good time to enable iCloud on your devices. We have natively integrated Daedalus into Ulysses’ sidebar, so there’s no setup necessary, no linking, nothing.

Daedalus’ stacks will show up as groups, and you can use most of Ulysses’ advanced features to continue the work you started on the road. Or the coffee shop. Or the beach. The bed. The couch. The Eiffel Tower. Mount Everest. ISS. Kepler 21b. So cool.

External Sources

Last but not least, you can even import and edit classic .txt and .markdown files, and have Ulysses keep them on your disk (i.e. outside Ulysses’ library). As an example, you can point Ulysses to a folder on your Dropbox, and have its contents behave just like native groups and sheets.

Some editor features will be limited (no images, no attachments), but that’s certainly negligible, compared to the alternatives. If we dare say so.

And… that’s… a wrap. You should now know enough to get around, and if you don’t, we have failed miserably.

So without further ado, you’re on your own.

Happy editing!

1. Type (fn), put text into the popover, hit CMD-Return, continue. ↩