A Letter From The Soulmen

Hi there,
this is Marcus from the Soulmen. Please allow me to introduce you to Ulysses III.
This app is the culmination of 18 months of hard work, sweat and tears, built upon a 10 years experience creating writers software for the Mac and iOS.
It is based on the simple idea of a one-stop place for all your texts, be it small snippets, or large, life-spanning projects. Its built to inspire, to encourage experimentation, and to grow steadily along whatever youll throw at it.
If youre new to this, then please enjoy what we believe is the greatest text editor the world has ever seen. A blank slate powered by a toolset of endless possibilities, limited only by your imagination as a writer.
If youre coming from Ulysses 2, youre in for some hardcore culture shock. Make no mistake: This is all-new, all-different, and there is no sense in trying to apply any of its rules to Ulysses III. So just treat this as you would any other new product, and dont try to hunt down old features or recreate behaviors chances are you wont nd them. Youll have to start over. Youll hate it. Youll love it. Trust me.
Just know that despite its name, this is a 1.0 release. Its the start of something really big, and we will update and rene this baby on a steady basis. Also remember that we are humans, and thus far from being perfect. There will be shortcomings, errors even, and you will have questions. We are anxiously awaiting your feedback good, bad, mostly good hopefully , so please dont hesitate to reach out to us.
Lastly, understand that this is a product of pure dedication. Were a small team, we love what we do, and we care deeply about it. We thats Max Seelemann, Marcus Fehn, Friedrich Grter, Gtz Fabian and Vivien Botin.
We are the Soulmen, and this is Ulysses III.
Its yours now. Explore, play around. Have fun.
Marcus Fehn | The Soulmen
March 2013

Overview
By now youve probably skipped this introduction and manically clicked on what few buttons are visible on screen. Thats alright, let it out.
As soon as youre ready, we should cover some basics:

1.
Ulysses III is what we call an enhanced plain text editor. Everything you see headlines, lists and emphasis is just typed in. We will come back to this later.
2.
Ulysses III is a single-library app, and all your texts live in this single library. There is no Open, no Save, no Finder access it all happens right inside this window.

3.
Ulysses III fully utilizes iCloud, i.e. if you have iCloud set up and enabled, Ulysses will store everything on Apples super-modern mega-clusters. You can then access your texts from all of your Macs, as long (or as soon) as youre connected to the web.

Most importantly, Ulysses III is built to grow and adapt. You can use it as a sophisticated notepad, you can create your next American Novel. You can feed your blog, keep everything neatly organized, or mess around at will.
There is no right way to do things here, so make yourself comfortable, and make it your own.

Ok, but how do I?

If you have used any kind of three-pane-app before, you should have no problem navigating and using Ulysses. And if youre familiar with the likes of Markdown and Textile, you should even feel right at home in the editor. There may be a few special cases where were handling things a bit differently, but all in all this should be rather common ground.
Anyway, UI-Overview from left to right:

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SIDEBAR

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SHEET LIST

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EDITOR

And thats it. The sidebar is divided into sections and should be pretty self-explanatory. Depending on whether youve got iCloud enabled, or whether youre a user of Daedalus Touch, you will see different sections, but these are no-brainers.
The sheet list is where all your texts reside.
And this here is the editor.

OH-KEY! But HOW DO I?

You add groups and lters via the sidebars plus menu, and you add sheets via CMD-N. If you select a group in the sidebar, its contents will show up in the sheet list. Select a sheet, and it shows up in the editor.
Filters are a special kind of group. Once set up, they will look at the group theyre in and list all sheets that match the set criteria. For example, you can set up a lter that only lists sheets with a keyword of fantastic. If you place it deep within a nested group, say, six levels down, the lter will only show matching sheets within that very group.
You can even select multiple groups and lters (by holding down CMD), and get their combined contents listed in the sheet column.

Its the sheets, baby!

All writing is done on Ulysses sheets. Sheets are somewhat equivalent to classic documents, though they dont require a title or a le name or such.
Sheets can hold any amount of text, and you can freely move sheets around and sort them at will. You can also select multiple sheets and glue them together (CMD-J). They will then behave as a single sheet in the editor, which is especially cool if you rather have a lot of small chunks than a single, monolithic wall of text.
But again, there is no right or wrong way here, and different projects will require different approaches. Just experiment and see what works best for you.

Added bonus
Since sheets are likely to live in the vicinity of other sheets, we gured it would be nice if you could easily navigate between them right from within the editor. There are keyboard shortcuts for this (CMD-ALT-up/down), but if youre equipped with a Magic Mouse or trackpad, you can simply scroll to the top or bottom and pull to switch.
You should try this now to get the hang of it. Just come back here, as were about to look at the cool stuff.

Plain Text Enhanced

By now you should have noticed all these funny characters before headlines and within the text. You should also have noticed these colored bubbles, and wondered how they found their way into this otherwise format-free introduction.
You may even have marveled at how nice everything looks, how beautiful the text is set, how headlines are outdented and lists indented, and how all this is possible without using fancy formatting palettes, rulers and font panels. And, ultimately, what it all means, what its good for, and why you should care.
We believe that writers should not be bothered with layout tasks. At the very least, layout tasks should never interfere with the writing process itself. Call it what you will distraction-free, zenlike, purely semantic, mini minimal, neo retro , fact is that content creation is best kept separate from presentation, or else the latter will get in the way. Eventually. By design (pun, sorry).
Ulysses uses so-called minimal markup to dene, not format or style, text passages. The full list of available denitions is accessible via CMD-9, and it should have you covered left to right. From

headlines to lists, to images and footnotes, you simply assign meaning to text passages by entering some easy to remember shortcuts.

Need a title? Create a title.

Need a quote?
Create a quote.

Need a footnote? Create one.1 No need to reach for your mouse, just type. Just. Type.

360 degree semantics

Now for the fun part: Ulysses can output your writing to a host of standard formats, such as Plain Text, RTF, Word, HTML and even PDF. It does so by translating your plain text input based on the denition of the minimal markup. If your brain starts to hurt, heres a simple example
Lets assume you want to emphasize a text passage. You select the word emphasize (do so), and press the keyboard shortcut CMD-I. Notice the extra characters that were entered around the word.
You have just told Ulysses, in its own plain text language, that this passage should be an emphasized passage. Now Ulysses knows and will never forget. So when you export your text to, say, RTF, Ulysses will translate this emphasized passage into what RTF understands in this case, it will format your emphasized passage as italicized text. If you export to HTML, Ulysses will translate the passage to semantically correct <em>.

Headlines such as this will get a larger font in RTF and will be tagged with <h2> in HTML.
And so on.
The beauty of this should be obvious by now: Instead of worrying about how your output looks, you can concentrate on what your content is supposed to mean. This may be frightening at rst, but trust us, its not.
Its awesome.

Type (fn), put text into the popover, hit CMD-Return, continue.

Attachments, Notes & Comments

Theres a bar atop every sheet which is called the attachment bar. Attachments allow you to place arbitrary content next to your not-so arbitrary main content: images, text notes and keywords. Keywords are especially nice, since you can set up lters which will look for these keywords.
Images and text notes can be attached multiple times, and all attachments can be torn off and placed anywhere onscreen. You can even zoom into images, ip through PDFs and use most markup within text notes.
Another way to add notes is to create annotations or inline comments. Comments can also span entire paragraphs.

By Popover Demand
As you have seen, most of Ulysses advanced features are tucked away in small popovers. That way, they remain invisible unless you really need them. Most popovers can be torn-off and turned into always-on oating HUDs for quick reference and/or direct access. They make a good t for a second monitor by the way.
And while some popovers are only available from within the editor, others can also be called in the sidebars. As an example, you can invoke Quick Export via the contextual menu on groups or lters. You can also check text statistics that way.
Pro tip: Quick Export, Favorites and Navigator feature full keyboard navigation. So if you feel like a power user, try this

Hit CMD-8 Use up/down arrow to navigate Try to select this headline No, this one THIS ONE!!!

iCloud vs On My Mac
In Overview, it states:

if you have iCloud set up and enabled, Ulysses will store everything on Apples super-modern mega-clusters

Well, we lied. Its completely up to you where things get stored, and you can freely move your texts from the cloud to local storage only and vice versa. As long as both options are enabled in preferences, that is:

Integrating Daedalus Touch

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Obviously, everything stored in On My Mac will no longer be available on all the other Macs you own and use, but thats not necessarily a bad thing, is it?

If you own Daedalus Touch for iOS (and, frankly, you should), now is a good time to enable iCloud on your devices. We have natively integrated Daedalus into Ulysses sidebar, so theres no setup necessary, no linking, nothing.
Daedalus stacks will show up as groups, and you can use most of Ulysses advanced features to

continue the work you started on the road. Or the coffee shop. Or the beach. The bed. The couch. The Eiffel Tower. Mount Everest. ISS. Kepler 21b. So cool.

External Sources
Last but not least, you can even import and edit classic .txt and .markdown les, and have Ulysses keep them on your disk (i.e. outside Ulysses library). As an example, you can point Ulysses to a folder on your Dropbox, and have its contents behave just like native groups and sheets.
Some editor features will be limited (no images, no attachments), but thats certainly neglectable, compared to the alternatives. If we dare say so.
And thats a wrap. You should now know enough to get around, and if you dont, we have failed miserably.
So without further ado, youre on your own.
Happy editing!

Basic Operation

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CMD-N to create a new sheet
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CMD-SHIFT-N too create a new group
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CMD-CTRL-N to create a new lter
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Items will always be created in vicinity to the current selection
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If there is no selection, or if the selection cant accept new content (Library All comes to mind), items will be created in the top-most category (e.g. iCloud)

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Click to select

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Double-click to edit

HUDs and Views

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CMD-1 to toggle sidebars
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CMD-2 to toggle sheet column
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CMD-3 to toggle editor-only view
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CMD-5 to show Favorites (FIVEorites)
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CMD-6 to show Quick Export (SIXport)
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CMD-7 to show Statistics
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CMD-8 to show Navigator (NavigEIGHTor, get it?)
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CMD-9 to show Markup Cheat Sheet

Find & Replace

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CMD-F to show Find panel

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ALT-CMD-F to show Find & Replace panel

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ESC to close Find/Replace panel

Font Size

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CMD-plus to increase font size

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CMD-minus to decrease font size

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CMD-0 to reset font size to default value

Screen Modes

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CMD-ALT-P to toggle Pure Mode
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CMD-ALT-L to toggle Dark Mode
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CMD-CTRL-F to toggle Fullscreen Mode
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If you read this far, theres no reason to stop now

Markup

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-# for Headlines
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CMD-I for emphasize
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CMD-B for strong
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CMD-L for links
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CMD-K for removing any sort of Markup (Kill)
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CMD-9 to show the Markup Cheat Sheet, in case you cant remember any of this

Lists

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TAB to increase list indentation


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SHIFT-TAB to decrease list indentation

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ALT-Return to automatically add another list item

Cheat Sheet

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When showing the Markup Cheat Sheet (CMD-9), you can click on any listed markup to apply it to the current selection

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This works with multiple selections (CMD-Click to select different parts of your text)

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Multi-level paragraphs, such as lists and block quotes, will get indented +1 every time you click

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Shift-clicking either removes the markup or outdents multi-level paragraphs

Media

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Dragndrop images, videos, PDFs into editor to create a text object which holds the item

Text Objects

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CMD-click to select

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Double-click to open popover

Text Object Popovers

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CMD-Return to close and move insertion point forward
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ESC to close and keep object selected
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TAB to switch between input elds
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Drag popover to tear it off and turn it into a oating HUD

Navigation, Sidebar

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Right arrow on groups to open group


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Right arrow on stack to switch focus to sheet column

Navigation, Sheet Column

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Right arrow to switch focus into editor (placing insertion point at last edited location)

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Left arrow to switch focus into sidebar

Navigation, Editor

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At the start of a sheet:
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Double-tap up arrow to move one sheet up
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At the end of a sheet:
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Double-tap down arrow to move one sheet down
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Anywhere within a sheet:
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CMD-ALT-up arrow to move one sheet up
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CMD-ALT-down arrow to move to next sheet
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Double-tap CMD-left arrow to switch focus into sheet column

Copy & Move in Sidebars

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By default, dragging groups and sheets to and from iCloud or On My Mac will always move, i.e. contents will get transferred to the new location

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Dragging to and from Daedalus and External Sources will always copy, i.e. contents will live in both locations afterwards

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Hold ALT while dragging, to force copy groups and sheets

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Hold CMD while dragging, to force move groups and sheets

Misc.

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CMD-S will create a new version of the current sheet. Select Browse All Versions from the File menu to see how often you invoked that command

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CMD-J will glue together selected sheets (Join)

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If only a single sheet is selected, it will be glued to the previous sheet

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If there is no sheet above the currently selected sheet, nothing will happen, because nothing

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can

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You can have multiple windows open at the same time (CMD-ALT-N)

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You can even have the same sheet visible in all open windows, which makes for some fancy show-off while editing, but its of not much use, to be honest

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