I’ve taken the Ulysses plunge. After the hundredth time forcing myself to sit down and learn to like or even use Scrivener at all (if for no other reason than that in the online world, where hell is endless subscription fees, it felt great to simply buy something), it was time to move on.

I still consider myself essentially computer-illiterate; I basically treat Computer Things — on or offline — as a glorified typewriter and piece of paper that people magically have access to. (And exactly for this reason, I’m grateful for the folks who know what they’re doing and make Computer Things easier for people like me.) All this web stuff is almost entirely virtual paper for me. Any step that complicates that image-relationship is disorienting. And Scrivener has been nauseating.

This is why both the Wordpress blog and the Micro blog look the way they do — the themes they use are as close to a plain (/magic) piece of paper as I can find. I don’t want elaborate designs or clicks or navigation menus (or tantalizing titles… wink, wink 🤓).

I just want to sit, type, publish.

So far (18 hours in), Ulysses seems great. Markdown is the easiest thing in the world to write with and I love it. Markdown XL in Ulysses seems okay so far, but some of the page features seem distracting, so if I can’t find a theme that makes it more plain-texty, I may switch it to regular Markdown. In fact, getting as close to the way Buttondown approaches newsletter writing, with a Markdown pane on the left and a preview pane on the right, is kind of what I’m after overall.

It’s like a Markdown mullet — business in the front, party in the back.

And now I’m going to try to publish this directly from the Ulysses. So if you’re reading this, yay for me and yay for Ulysses. 🙂