Fuck You Ulysses!

My love-hate for my most used application, Ulysses

The Ulysses Markdown text editor and organizer

If you read much of anything of my writing there is a good chance it was written in Ulysses. I probably spend more time inside this application than any other application for many years now. Most of my online articles have been written inside Ulysses. From the beginning I loved how it let me organize articles, search and filter. It not only worked great in this regard but it also looked really nice. It was pleasurable to write in Ulysses because as a person who is a sucker for beautiful things it made felt both smooth, pleasant and beautiful.

It also had nice integration with Medium, allowing me to publish straight to it from Ulysses. Later it got a really good integrated system for spell checking and grammar removing any need to use Grammarly.

In short Ulysses was kind of the perfect application: It did the task it was designed for very well while looking stunning whilst doing it.

So, why am I writing such crude dismissive title as “Fuck you Ulysses!”

Because today, I just had it with this application. It is something about getting failed time and again by someone you want to love. Ulysses has it all. It was supposed to be the perfect writing companion, allowing tools to disappear in the background while you focus on your work.

Except for some reason Ulysses has never managed to get the backend of the app working well. Sure they got a smooth sexy well thought out user interface which you interact with, but everything below that sucks. All the years I used Ulysses I have stumbled into syncing issues.

Now, it doesn’t actually happen often which is why I stuck out with the Ulysses. However once they happen it is really hard to fix. The whole storage format is opaque. Supposedly you write in Markdown, but what is actually stored is some kind of binary format. Actually it is a zip file containing an XML file and binary plist file.

When you try to troubleshoot these problems, you can go to your Dropbox page to look at files, but since they are not plain text you need to download them, rename them to have the zip suffix and then open them to look at the content.

To be clear part of my frustration is because of Dropbox itself. I used to sync with iCloud but it has the annoying behavior of suddenly removing files locally to save space. Now Dropbox copied this annoying behavior. The result is that every time my video editor would make too big cache, Dropbox would begin aggressively removing files from my hard drives. Hence while working on files in Ulysses I would see all my local writing rapidly disappear. Now I cannot search for existing notes and articles as the files are no longer locally present.

This sort of “friendly helpful” behavior has always been one of the things that annoyed me the most about Windows. Mac always used to excel at being easy to use but not proactive. Like it would not shift the ground under your feet or pop up with endless messages suggesting “helpful” changes. The combination of simplicity and full control is what long appealed to me as a Mac user.

A shift towards a more Windows inspired tendency to be “helpful” without my consent is not something I am thrilled about.

Either way Ulysses in its automatic behavior below the user interface surface has always been an annoyance for me. I remember how I used to run out of space on my computer without grasping why, only to notice Ulysses without telling me was doing these massive backups of my whole library regularly. This seriously ate into my limited hard drive space.

I strongly dislike software doing lots of “helpful” things behind your back that you never asked for with serious consequences. We are still not at a spot in time when one can waste hard drive space willy nilly.

I don’t write on different computers that often so the synching issues have not been a major deal breaker for me, but I start to notice that almost every time I write on another computer I run into some kind of synching issues and they are rarely something I manage to fix quickly.

Today I have spent a lot of time getting nowhere leading to my frustration with Ulysses. These kinds of problems have been with Ulysses for years and they still have not managed to fix them. All while they now require a subscription service. I absolutely hate subscription based software.

I sucked it up because it is an application I love and use actively for so many years. I kept going back to it from iA Writer because I like their user interface better and their features.

But here is the thing: iA Writer gets the basic right. I never had syncing problems with them. And iA Writer is far more transparent. It stores your files in plain markdown format making troubleshooting far easier. That also makes migration to other tools easier. I dread the idea of having to convert my Ulysses library to proper Markdown. And it also defies the real reason I picked up Ulysses in the first place. I wanted my notes in Markdown to be future proof. I want easy migration and the ability to easily use Ulysses with other tools. E.g. plain markdown can easily be used with file diff tools and Git.

It may seem unfair to write “fuck you Ulysses,” given how much I have used and enjoyed this application. But it is precisely why I feel this way. Because I like and enjoy this app so much I want it to work. But despite years passing it just never fixes the fundamentals. The subscription model is simply the last straw.

It is also just a general frustration with modern software. I have been a computer user since the 1980s and while we have had tremendous positive developments since then we have also lost a lot of the transparency software used to have. When I first started using Mac, it was actually quite easy to grasp the nuts and bolts of how it all worked.

There was no sandboxing complicating things. Configuration files such as plist files were plain text you could read. And even the user interface of applications was stored in nib files you could simply open in Xcode. This may sound crazy to you youngsters but back in the day you could actually just go straight in and change the user interface of almost any Mac app. I could throw in another button and wire it up to a specific action.

You had software such as F-script which allowed you to call almost any function on a live application.

In a way it is ridiculous that today with much faster hardware we have increasingly left behind simply to understand plain text formats and systems.

Anyway I will be leaving Ulysses. iA Writer will likely be my new home. Although I don’t think I can let Ulysses go completely. Should they get serious about fixing their fundamental issues, I will even suck it up and pay that subscription as much as I hate it. Unless of course iA Writer or someone else makes something with as nice user experience as Ulysses and which actually does syncing and file formats properly.