The World’s Best Text Editor?
I am always on the hunt for something to believe in, and if there’s anything the perfectionistic writer craves (or is a sucker for) it’s the promise of a perfect text editor (what, you still write in a word processor?). If your aim is to make great shit, then you need great tools. You need a space, as Thoreau would say, in which to be a traveler at home.
Named after the great teller of tales, Ulysses 3 (made by the Soulmen) is billed as such. After 18 months in development, it just hit the Mac App store and is selling (one week only) for $20. You probably never heard of Ulysses 2, but it was a progenitor to other project-based writing apps like Scrivener, maybe the first with a so-called distraction free full-screen mode, and although I could never find a way to consistently use it—built mostly with novel writing in mind—it’s an impressive attempt at satisfying the needs of creative writers who aren’t poets.
What Writing in 2013 Looks Like
My interest of late has been to 1.) write everything in plain text files using Markdown to format, 2.) have those plain text files selectable and orderable for export, and the export formats (typesetting, really) highly configurable 3.) have all my texts available across all of my little machines.
I would like to not have to copy my text out of the editor, in other words, and typeset in a word processor like Mellel (the WP of choice for the choosey) or Pages. I love using text editors like iA Writer, or Byword, but they do #1 only, but even in conjunction with a Markdown parser like Marked—well, they don’t account much for the contol one needs over poems.
The Start of the Nostos
So based on the fact that what Ulysses and Scrivener excel at is numbers 1 & 2, although not so much for a slew of separate text files that aren’t part of a single document (like chapters in a book), I have put some hope in this complete re-thinking of Ulysses by these writerly-minded fellows. In particular because I’ve been so in love with Daedulus Touch—their innovative iOS writing app—the only one of many I own I’ve been able to make anything on. So I was hot for this 1.0 release, and wouldn’t let my inability to feed and shoe my children stop me from getting it.
Instead of discrete files kept in your file system, these two programs use what they called sheets, which are kept in stacks; all your texts are therefore in the app, sync’d on iCloud, or kept on Dropbox (or, what I like, both). There are already some other reviews out there that give details of how Ulysses III works (or bitches about it). Take a look.
Suffice it to say after two days of use I’m intrigued, however incomplete it remains. The sophisticated export functions I was expecting, for example, didn’t make the 1.0 cut (and no preview function, or very good integration with Marked). Keeping all my writing in the database of one app, especially one that syncs with iCloud—core data is getting some bad press of late—makes me pretty nervous. I experienced one crash while writing this, and upon return not a single letter of text was lost. That’s promising. It’s promising.
The Judgment of Tiresias
The blind Theban prophet foresaw that Ulysses would reach his home and, after much suffering, grow old and die in peace. Since I’ve already been using several other plain text editors, the switch to Ulysses is incremental, with almost nothing but benefit as I await that day. And I’m not sure how it couldn’t keep getting better and better and closer to that imagined ideal. To say the least, the writing environment is lovely, functional, and configurable (switching from dark to light modes, for example, is a keystroke). It feels good to write in, and those aesthetics are close to everything. Where we arrive is a function of our ambition, and if the Soulmen are intent on making an editor flexible enough to serve writers of various kinds (I’m not holding out for a poetry-specific app), then maybe they will succeed. Blake says that exuberance is beauty, meaning (in part) that beauty erupts where there is hope and it takes hope to work with intelligence and energy toward any goal. They have sold me on their exuberance at least. If you are a writer and can imagine a better on screen workspace $20 is not much for such a thing. Go get it. And if you’re still trying to make great shit in Microsoft Word, there’s something out of phase there.