Based on a previous discussion about markdown editors, I’d like to hear opinions on the following. I’ve attached a screenshot showing the same text in two different markdown applications: iA Writer (on the left) and Ulysses (on the right). Which of these two do you think offers a more enjoyable writing experience?
I’m simply curious and not trying to convey any particular point or agenda with my question.
Completely subjective: I strongly prefer the Ulysses view
IA Writer because it has hanging indents for headers which Ulysses does not. This bugs me.
Funny how you come up with this question when I have done an experiment on this just recently 
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For me it is (still) Ulysses as I just prefer the ways in which it lets me adjust the writing environment to my liking. In is Writer I just couldn’t get over that fact that I couldn’t find a font I really enjoyed, or that I wasn’t able to adjust the spacing of lines, length of lines, height of paragraphs and such stuff. And also that I get to choose or style my own theme in Ulysses with the colors I like.
In the beginning I thought this might not be a big deal, but to me it was. I simply didn’t find a setup in it Writer that I enjoyed writing in - event though it offers functionality that I miss in Ulysses.
So in the end I stayed in Ulysses - even though I not happy with its performance.
Btw, which font(s) are you using in the Ulysses view?
Scrivener remains the best.
I much prefer reading the Ulysses one but it’s not an entirely fair comparison.
Writing and especially editing can benefit from the extra line spacing (leading) and the iaWriter font is extremely clear when looking for mispellings or wrong punctuation which you might not spot quite so easily in the Ulysses where your eye will tend to fall back on “real” reading (whole words and phrases at a time) as opposed to copy editing.
In real life, I like to write and read in Ulysses, with a theme of my choice, but there is a place for less visually attractive editors to do specific jobs.
I’m using the D22 theme with New York font.
As they say, “great minds … “ 
I do a lot of writing in Microsoft Word (for work) and one of the things which distracts me if the formatting is not representative of the final document.
For writing I would probably pick Ulysses, for reading I would definitely pick something akin to Ulysses.
The iA Writer view (syntax visible, all monospaced) held out for me for many years, though my preference was with syntax highlighting on, so I could see the code, but Typora (similar to the Ulysses) view above has been quite nice to use recently.
Though, having written my thesis in LaTeX, markdown syntax was (and is) somewhat easier to read! Especially as I’m playing with LaTeX again at the minute, driving home the point.
I only write in BBEdit, Drafts, or email so I don’t feel qualified to comment. 
You can still comment if you prefer the left or right.
For me, WYSIWYG always
My first typewriter was a used Royal portable but, as I recall, I did most of my work in college on an IBM Selectric. The one thing I didn’t like about Evernote’s web clipper was the pages it produced were too “fancy” for this old boomer. Nostalgia votes left.
Definitely Ulysses. To throw something else in the mix try to open it in Marked 2 and see the reading experience.
I must first confess that I use neither editor, don’t use markdown, and am an enthusiastic Scrivener user. As far as the question, I don’t even want to guess which interface is better since there is more to the interface than how it looks. But as far as how it looks, I prefer Ulysses because it is rendering the markdown making it look more like WYSIWYG. However is either of these attempting to be WYSIWYG?
Scrivener is emphatically not WYSIWYG is this seems upsetting to new users since it looks to be WYSIWYG. The formatting (margins, fonts, paragraph indents,…) in the editor can and should be set to whatever is most pleasant for writing. The exporting process (called “compiling” in Scrivener lingo) substitutes new formatting for the target output. In my case I can compile the single document for ebook, 6x9 paperback, and 8.5x11 drafts with each having different formats, and different from the editing format.
All that said, if I had to choose between iA Writer and Ulysses, and based on what I’ve read in this thread, I’d choose Ulysses.
If I’m trying to get stuff done then the one on the left, no distracting font effects to distract me from getting stuff written. Prettifying can come later.
The one on the left to write, while the one on the right is more pleasing to read.
I like monospace. There is something soothing about writing in a text editor without the markup. It just me and the words(separation of content and format).I remember when MS word first came out. I thought that WYSIWYG was going to be fantastic. Turns out, I missed WirdPerfect and it’s non magical formatting.
