David and Katie dive deep on fiddly writing apps Scrivener and Ulysses. We talk about how these apps work, their features, the good, the bad and the best use cases.
Show Notes
Listened to this episode today in 2023 - The fervour for which David had for Scrivener was really surprising. Assuming this has translated over to Obisidian - are there any Scrivener / Ulysess users that have stayed with those apps from back in 2018?
I am looking into utilising it for long form project report writing, which is not its wheelhouse I imagine, but fascinated by the legal documentation process in these apps David was employing back then.
I have used Scrivener for report writing for years. Has stood the test of time. I never jelled with Ulysses. With Scrivener for most reports I use their Non Fiction LaTeX template which gives beautiful output, TOC, indexes, etc which clients appreciate and usually say āhow did you do that?ā.
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Absolutely yes. I write all my long form academic witting in Scrivener and itās still really marvellous. I think it was probably my first proper Mac-only app infatuation; first software purchase a little while after when I got my first ye olde white plasticky Macbook back in ā¦ 2008/9?
These days all my note taking is in Obsidian and Iām up to my eyeballs in a major new book project. But I canāt wait to have enough clarity to my thinking to turn to Scriv soon and write a first chapter draft.
I did use Ulysses a bit; and Bear, but these have all gone in favour of Obsidian.
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I still use Scrivener and Byword. I never got into Ulysses.
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Cal Newport is a noted Scrivener user for his long form articles and books. He discusses it as part of his process on the podcast sometimes.
Iām not a huge writer but Iāve tried Ulysses from time to time. I actually wrote my weddings vows with Ulysses back in 2020, exported them to ePub, converted the ePub to Amazonās format using Calibre, and then loaded the vows onto my Kindle for the ceremony.
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Itās fascinating, as itās marketed so heavily to authors (fiction / non-fiction), but I could see it filling a gap which Microsoft Word and Pages really fall over. Credit to another user here:
Iāve lived my life in Word for work everyday for over a decade in Project Management and this really rang home. Iām trialling the free trial currently in Scrivener and am hopeful with these comments that it may have a suitable place in my workflow to shift away from Word.
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I have had an on/off relationship with Ulysses for years. I was and am still waiting for the new nvAlt and sadly I dropped Drafts because I couldnāt get it to search properly from spotlight and hence Houday Spot. Since Ulysses now has some LaTeX capacity: I am likely to stick with it. I only objected really to the proprirtry storage. However I mostly move anything I want to keep now to DEVONthink 3 so that doesnāt matter really. In fact the search doesnāt much.
Should Brett get a fully keyboard controlled not taker going I would try it. Ulysses is keyboard controlable up until the point where one moves things out of it, since I do that a lot I donāt consider it ācompleteā in that way. Pity really, I could probably rig some Keyboard Maestro macros but I canāt be bothered these days to find the time.
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Iāve been using Scrivener for at least 10 years now. Iāve never tried Ulysses and briefly looked at Obsidian. Obsidian is really a different class of program.
Scrivener excels for long-form writing, especially for those who write non-linearly. Itās strictly for organization and writing. You need something else for page layout beyond just plain text. And the editor is emphatically not WYSIWYG but instead what you see is what looks comfortable for writing.
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In fairness Scrivener does a lot more ā and is very customisable re: output, for instance (not features I use much myself). Some people (again, not me, but check out the Scrivener podcast for examples!), also use it as a fully fledged research repository: images, notes, websites, the works. For me, it just doesnāt scale that way.
To me Scrivener and the many note-taking apps are fundamentally different beasts. I wrote most of my first book in Scrivener ā and never got into the habit of taking many āsnapshotsā. I didnāt do a lot of note-taking outside the app, and rather just drafted, and drafted, and drafted, and ā¦ It took a long time to write the book, in part because I spent way to much time crafting fine prose when I should have been throwing ideas onto the page first; and finetune later (because, not all the ideas where on there to begin with, the re-writing wasnāt yet relevant). As a result, I also feel I lost of lot of the intermediate thinking, or the thinking I could have re-deployed elsewhere. Bad workflow on my part, I think!
For book #2, I now take many more notes as I am trying to more strictly separate the research process from the writing process. (Tricky distinction because Iām of the view that writing is writing, but note-taking, reading, annotating, walking and thinking, or a suddenly inspiration in the shower is also fundamentaly part of āwritingā). So I guess I mean the finer craft of it: which sentence goes where; paragraph sequencing, and so on. Anyway, my approach now is to first substantially generate my ideas (in Obsidian), and then only second turn to Scrivener for the latter part of the process. My hope is that I will have not only have a book at the end, but also a set of notes to which I will return to generate other outputs. Time will tell if this is a sound approach, or a waste of time 
Scrivener kills apps like Word (or Pages for that matter) for anything longer than a few pages. Its flexiblity and writer-friendliness is just terrific.
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Iām in the mist of a significant book project. I found this post incredibly helpful. I am going to modify my writing workflow process as a result. Thank you!
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In the mist of ā¦ or in the midst of? Freudian slip 
?
Anyway, be careful not to fix what aināt broke at your end. As I said, the jury is out whether I will see any major gains. I used to think that all writing is thinking. To some degree, that is still true, but some writing is definitely also just tinkering, and a form of procrastination. On reflection, I also always associated Scrivener with SERIOUS WRITING, where I practice my craft as a communicator. I treat Obsidian more as a place to slap down ideas. I donāt know why it works like that for me, but for now, Iām sticking with it.
Good luck with your project ā keep us updated!
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Iāve been a loyal Scrivener user since 2008; no typo my first licence purchase was in 2008. Looked at the upstart Ulysess as it was announced and decided to remain faithful to Scrivener. It runs on my Macs (Mac mini, MacBookPro), iPad, and iPhone. If it were realistic would install a Watch version too.
That Ulysses is a subscription app puts me off completely. Oh and it has no mobile version for iPhone or iPad.
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I have both Scrivener and Ulysses. Scrivener I hardly use. The effort required to compile is way too complex for my liking and if you only do so occasionally, you have to relearn every time.
Ulysses has become my defacto writing tool. I do a fair amount of public speaking and write everything in Ulysses. It only took me 20 min to create an A5 export template with all the formatting I needed, which I use to export my text to A5 and drag into the reMarkable app. This works really well and is my public speaking workflow. Ulysses also has a āProjectsā section which creates self-contained libraries, so not everything is in your main library. I use this for funeral services and other one-off items.
Ulysses is available on iPhone and iPad.
One must compare Scrivener for Writing vs Ulysses for writing. To compare Scrivener Compiling with Ulyssesās writing is apples and oranges.
Scrivener compiling can be complex if one tries to change a lot of things without knowing how to do. Using the templates without change (which produce much the same as Ulysses) in Scrivener is pretty simple.
The good news is people can use whatever they want.
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I wasnāt only comparing writing. An export template is easy to achieve in Ulysses. In fact, Ulysses has powerful export capabilities. Creating advanced export templates, maybe no easier than doing this in Scrivener, but there is an Export Styles repository where people post their creations, making is quite easy to find something similar and modify.
There is also an extensive reference showing how to style nearly every element for export into a myriad of formats.
At a base level though, I find Ulysses export easier than I do Scrivener compile, but as you have said, people can choose whatever they want. I was only highlighting that Ulysses is quite a powerful tool even for long-form writing and has great export capabilities.
Hah, upon reflection, probably both! 
After reading your post, the thing I will change is spending less time trying to get the prose perfect. Instead, Iāll focus on getting the initial draft finished. As to Obsidian, Iāve only been using it for notes I take on research articles and books. However, Iām going to try doing more idea drafting in Obsidian before transferring the text to Scrivener. This may speed up my work by encouraging me to focus on the ideas and less on phrasing at the early stages.
Thanks again for the insightful post.
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Not according to the web page I saw. Only mention was of the Mac App Store. But the whole subscription model puts me off anyway.
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Ulysses has excellent iPad and iPhone apps. Just go to the App Store. I have used them extensively.
That said, Iām adverse to subscriptions as well, with only a few exceptions. 
Ulysses is definitely on Mac, iPhone and iPad. If not ā¦ Iāve been having some really weird dreams the last few years
I actually prefer Scrivener, and itās best - I think - when I use it on my mac 90% of the time, and only occasionally use the iPhone and iPad versions. Outlining and moving things around is soooooo much easier on the mac (and, also so much easier than on Ulysses).
That might be beause iāve spent years learning how to use it, and I just feel comfortable using it.
ā
That said ā¦ I also use Ulysses every so often, and itās splendid, and totally worth it (for me).
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