A simple text editor that will let you focus on your writing
When it comes to writing, getting distracted and procrastinating is one of the biggest challenges to getting it done. It’s easy to get distracted by things like Internet videos, movies, and music, but sometimes your text editor’s very own design will be more than enough to distract you. Luckily, there are text- editing apps like Ulysses that aims to limit a user’s distractions by providing them with as simple an interface as possible. Does Ulysses have what it takes to compete against text-editing giants like Scrivener or iA Writer?
Simplicity for Distraction-free Writing
Ulysses best feature is its simplicity. This is best exemplified in its minimalist interface. Ulysses tries to avoid the unnecessary clutter of major editing apps like Microsoft Word. In those apps, the interface is littered with all sorts of symbols and icons, each serving a different purpose. Ulysses doesn’t have those in its interface. Instead, its interface is limited to the text editing workspace and the navigational panels beside it. There are no toolbars with esoteric symbols that just clutter your workspace. It’s just you and your writing.
Simple, but Functional
Ulysses’s simplicity should not be mistaken for a lack of features, however. Despite its minimalist design, Ulysses has a lot of features that will undoubtedly increase writers’ productivity. One of its most helpful features is the single library. With this feature, users can save and find everything they’ve written with speed and efficiency. There’s no need to go through all sort of dialogue boxes just to save your work.
Its search function is also powerful. Not only can it match text to find what you need, it can also search through style formats and headings. Speaking of style, Ulysses has a Style Exchange where users can download export styles. Users who publish to WordPress and Medium will be pleased to know that Ulysses can publish text directly to both of them.
Difficult for Beginners
A minor point against Ulysses, however, is the fact that it has a steep learning curve. Unlike most text editors, style editing is accomplished using Markdown language. For people who have no experience using Markdown language, this might be a concern, but Ulysses does come with guides that can help people learn.
Similarly, exporting to HTML and ePub requires knowledge of CSS. This feature is much less easy to ignore as CSS is not a very easy language to learn. It’s a helpful skill to have, though, so it might be worth it to learn CSS along the way.
Simple, but Powerful
Ulysses seems simple, but it has so much features that it can‘t be ignored when it comes to competing with other writing apps. It’s definitely a writing app that’s meant for web publishing. There are several features that you need to study in order to make the most of Ulysses’s features, but as a whole, it’s totally worth it. If you’re looking for a simple but powerful text-editing app, Ulysses can definitely go against the major apps in the business.
Ulysses is a unique Mac OS X text editing environment aimed directly at creative writers. With its innovative “tabbed” single-window interface, featuring integrated notepads, a documents browser, advanced search/filter capabilities and multi-document previews, Ulysses aims to give creative writers, novelists and storytellers the best writing experience available on any platform today.
Ulysses lets the writer focus entirely on content while aiding him in organizing the multiple parts of his work without forcing him into any pre-defined structure whatsoever. Developed exclusively for creative writers, Ulysses lacks both the functional overload of traditional word processors and the developers-oriented approach of classic text editors.
Additionally, Ulysses sports a fully extensible, plug-ins based export feature which enables the user to export their project into various different file formats, including the likes of “Plaintext”, “RTF” and “LaTeX”.
