Ulysses Reviews & Product Details

Ulysses manages to accomplish the often impossible task of allowing the kind of customization users say they want without deteriorating the beauty of the application along with its usability. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I personally wish there was a way to hide markdown formatting altogether. For example, if I write `*bold*` just show bold text, not the asterisks around it. If My cursor is within that word, then show the formatting to make editing easy for the user. I imagine that would be a very complex thing to implement but its something that I would absolutely love. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ulysses offers an easy and clean writing environment that is entirely customizable and incredibly usable. Because documents are stored as sheets instead of separate documents in some folder, you can hop around between “files” easily from the sidebar. Everything is searchable, and it’s simple to create new file “groups” for organization. Everything is synced through iCloud and available on iPad and iPhone. I really like being able to customize my work environment and create visual styles that match my mood. Because it uses markdown, it makes formatting easy and it looks really great. In particular, I like the typewriter scrolling that keeps the line that I’m typing in the dead center of my screen. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Creating export styles isn’t very easy. I would like to modify exported texts so I can better control the look, but it’s just not simple like everything else. This isn’t a big deal, however, because many users have created cool export styles. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ulysses interface and attention to typography helps me get in "the zone" really quickly. The full screen mode is exceptionally well done. Unlike a WYSIWYG editor, Ulysses uses a custom dialect of Markdown and gives you syntactical hints. This helps you to focus on content, rather than wasting time formatting text. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Still some bugs that need to be worked out: iCloud sync is insanely slow (possibly a Yosemite issue?), there's no way to hide the search bar (it resurrects on every restart), and the custom markdown dialect is awful. I really wish they had gone with a standard dialect, like MultiMarkdown, or at least support the CommonMark standards. I do a lot of tech blogging, so the funky dialects for code blocks, raw source, etc. mean I always have to do some post work in vim to tidy things up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ulysses is hands down the cleanest word processor I have ever used. I'm not a coder, but it took me just a couple minutes to get the hang of Markdown and start writing. The beauty of this program is that it is a word processor for the digital generation: there aren't ugly palettes blocking my view, nearly everything can be done on the keyboard (from italic to print preview), and it has a true distraction-free mode that is 110% better than Pages. Because only the essential format elements can be inputted (bullets or bold, i.e.), there are almost no formatting errors that will haunt me later, like having inconsistent font sizes or accidentally italicizing a space. All of the final touches happen when you're actually finished with the creative work, and it's as simple as choosing a style and exporting.

Ulysses is one of the more expensive programs, but it is seriously worth it. Get it and love it! Thanks Soulmen for one incredible app I use every day! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing about the Mac app, though I was disappointed when Daedulus, a paid app, just stopped working soon after the full iPad version was launched. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how minimalistic the whole thing is, really gives me room to write Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes it feels a bit hard to navigate, but that feeling is rare. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.