You need to understand this

Before typing your first sentence, word, character even, make sure to fully embrace the following concept. It will help you understand Ulysses, and it will make your life as a writer much, much easier. Promised.

Write, write, write

Ulysses’ main purpose is to help you write; to get what’s on your mind onto virtual paper. Everything else is secondary. And we mean everything: Editing, formatting, organizing, sharing, exporting, printing, publishing—all secondary. Because none of this matters, if there’s no text in the first place. You can do all of it with Ulysses, don’t worry, but let’s all agree that writing must come first.

Type, type, type

You’ve heard about “the flow”, right? That “flow” you’re supposed to get into. Where writing comes naturally, and words just pour from your fingertips. With Ulysses, we’re creating that flow for over 20 years now. By using a method so simple it’s almost embarrassing: Keeping your hands on the keyboard. While you write. Imagine that.

Click-a-di-clack

Ever wondered why they call it a Typewriter? You type, you write. You don’t lay out, and you’re not using a typesetter. There is no “bold” character on that keyboard, and no “24pt. Arial Black Condensed” key either. That’s secondary, as we said. A visual layer, applied to your text, so readers may differentiate a headline from body copy, or a strong passage from the rest of a dialog. But wouldn’t it be cool, if there actually was a key that said “headline”? Or a character that said “dialog”? Actually… isn’t there already a character that says “dialog”?

Tags is just a four-letter word

Until now, you probably didn’t realize that there are numerous cases, in which we just use characters (not formats) to change the meaning of a text passage. Parentheses come to mind, as do quotation marks. In some languages, such as Spanish, questions are wrapped in—not just ended with—question marks. We also use dashes to

• insert a thought into a sentence, and
• denote the origin of a quote, or
• make a list.

In Ulysses, we simply extend this concept to the max, and use meaningful characters across the board. No exceptions. Titles, headlines, comments, block quotes, highlights, you name it. We call these characters “tags”, and we call the whole approach “markup”.

What about...

When we say "to the max", we actually mean it. So even stuff like images, footnotes and tables can be added to your text by typing a few meaningful characters. As an example, find an empty paragraph like the one below, place the cursor at its start, and type "(tbl)"—that's right: tbl, in parentheses, without the quotes.

Isn't that cool? Of course, all these options are also available elsewhere, via menus and buttons. So you don’t have to memorize anything, if you don’t want to. But we figure you'll want to.

And that’s it already. The one concept you needed to wrap your head around: Your hands on the keyboard. Characters for everything. ¡You got this!