

Ulysses: a structured/semantic document editor for OS X - crux
http://www.the-soulmen.com/ulysses/index.html

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adw
Scrivener is terrific: <http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html>.
I've written book-length stuff in Emacs/LaTeX before, and I might go back to
that for typesetting, but I'd write in Scrivener.

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Hagelin
Using MultiMarkdown in Scrivener and then generating LaTeX works pretty well
for me, though I haven't written anything book-length with it.

[http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/using_multimarkdown_...](http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/using_multimarkdown_with_scriv/)

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snprbob86
This is really cool. There are a lot of areas where the state of the art
really is Word and Excel. For some use cases, a horizontal application is
perfectly adequate. However, all the rest are opportunities for enterprising
hackers.

~~~
zitterbewegung
I actually made a poetry book in LaTeX. It wasn't THAT hard.

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petercooper
Anyone here ready to earn some karma by vouching for it and giving a few
paragraphs on why I absolutely must try this out? :-)

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crux
I can tell you why I like it. There's an app that's been repped for here
called Scrivener, and like Scrivener (it predates Scr., actually), Ulysses is
an application that is supposed to make writing large amounts of text more
sane than standard word processors. It essentially combines elements of
outliners and information managers with a composition interface.

In general the UI for Ulysses is _very_ thoroughly thought out, and somewhat
idiosyncratic for that fact. Many people find it lacking or uncomfortable in
one way or another, but I can tell you that every element of the UI has been
considered and applied to fulfill the designers' very specific goal.

One of those UI values is that it's very semantically correct. There's no
formatting at all, except auto-formatting that you define yourself, which will
recognize plaintext tags. The way this shakes out is that I will write a
sentence like this: The &&quick&& brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

And then define a tag called 'emphasis', which is formed by a '&&' wrap, and
displays itself in a certain way depending on whether it's being viewed in a
window, fullscreen, printed, et cetera.

If you are a fan of working in plaintext and you are interested in more
structured ways to write long-form text, I think it's a great program.

EDIT: changed example markup to something more exotic for HN's own parser

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joe_the_user
What is a "composition editor?" or for that matter, an "information manager"?

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crux
I don't know what a composition editor is. But an information manager is,
generally, one of the wide range of applications that take unstructured, file-
like data and provide an application interface to them. What that entails
varies, but there's often indexing (and powerful search), tagging, and
sometimes NLP–a snippets manager, or a PIM like Eaglefiler, Together, Yojimbo,
DEVONthink and many many more.

EDIT: You might mean, "what's a composition interface?" In which case it's a
text-editor component, with some added UI sugar like current line
highlighting, word count, splitting, typewriting scrolling, full-screen mode,
et cetera. You know, an interface for composing text.

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Locke1689
Pretty cool. I do have to say that I prefer LaTeX though. If you're not into
writing LaTeX you may want to try LyX (<http://www.lyx.org/>). It's a WYSIWYM
LaTeX editor for Windows and UNIX-like (including OS X).

Heh, although when I say "Ulysses" out loud it makes me think "useless."

~~~
cstross
Apples and oranges.

LaTeX is a formatter. (Actually a full-blown interpreter, but it's generally
used for producing typeset text output from command files.)

Ulysses and Scrivener are an utterly different class of application; they're
used for composition and editing of complex compound documents, with an
emphasis on managing the structure (e.g. they both make it utterly trivial to
change the order of chapters in a book, swap subsections within a chapter,
write the text with no distractions, or mess around with the outline).

LyX is, effectively, a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX (that is handicapped by not
being flexible enough to generate arbitrary LaTeX documents, and so it tends
to be restricted to using a set range of LaTeX templates).

Might as well be comparing motorcycles and ro-ro ferries.

Finally: parading your lack of knowledge of classical mythology or modernist
literature really doesn't do you any favours.

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Locke1689
First, thanks for the information. I didn't understand from the site that
Ulysses is actually more of an organizational tool. It wasn't until I read
this[1] review article that I understood that.

However, you yourself made a few mistakes. Technically, LaTeX is not a
formatter, it is a markup language for the TeX typesetting system. In
addition, it is actually _not_ an interpreter (in the same way that HTML is
not an interpreter).

LyX is, as I said, a _WYSIWYM_ editor for LaTeX. It is also allows LaTeX
insertion and imports, so it should be arbitrarily flexible, not handicapped.

 _Finally: parading your lack of knowledge of classical mythology or modernist
literature really doesn't do you any favours._

Hmm. Actually I have read Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Finnegans Wake, as well as the Odyssey. James Joyce is probably one of my
picks for greatest authors who ever lived. My little remark was one of whimsy,
commenting on a little phonetic wordplay, not an expression of ignorance.

[1]
[http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/review/ulysses_is_a_heroic_wr...](http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/review/ulysses_is_a_heroic_writers_application/)

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jmatt
Ok so after I decided that it was interesting and cool, my first thought was,
"What's the emacs-mode for Ulysses?". I couldn't find one so it looks like I
may have to actually download and install it. Anyone know of similar emacs or
vim modes for writing?

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crux
I don't know of any such vim mode but I'd be very interested to hear about it.
The closest I have is a script that turns on things like wrap-by-word and
scroll-by-visual-line (given that in prose, what vim thinks of as lines, we
think of as paragraphs)

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grinich
Writeroom is pretty great too.

<http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom>

~~~
Hagelin
It's even better when combined with QuickCursor (free download), which allows
you to, with a keystroke, edit the contents of almost any textfield in
WriteRoom. It also works with other editors such as TextMate.

<http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursor/>

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plesn
Do I understand well : is this something similar to what would be a good GUI
for reStructuredText ? (I don't have OS X anymore to try it, unfortunately)

