Tips, Tricks & Thangs

Ulysses does lots of things differently from other text editors and word processors. Some things may be obvious, others more obscure; for some people everything will click from the start, others may need a little more guidance here and there.

Apart from that, Ulysses may be far more capable in certain areas than we could ever have imagined. Somebody may be creating art with this app, who knows?

So, this page will feature – in pretty loose order – tips, hints, links to interesting products, and even success stories. In the future, of course, as this is the release party.

One thang I got, though…

Things you might not know about the Note Pad
- The Note Pad shows by default one single piece of RTF space. You can write directly into the Note Pad, you can drag'n'drop text snippets from pretty much everywhere into the Note Pad.
  To create multiple notes, simply click the little plus button on the top right end of the pad. A new note will be created, and the existing note will be rolled into a new view, so to say.
  
  First the obvious: By clicking on the triangle next to each note, you can collapse an entry, clicking the triangle again will expand the entry. *Option-clicking* on one triangle will collapse/expand all entries.
  To rearrange entries, hold the Command key and click into the triangle-area to drag'n'drop single entries. A black line will appear, indicating the desired position.
  
  If you've collapsed some or all note entries, you probably got a large chunk of white space sitting in the Note Pad. You can now drag'n'drop text snippets onto this white space, and Ulysses will automatically generate a new note entry, holding the dragged snippet.
  
  If you have accidentally deleted a note entry, hit Command-Z to undo that action.
  Since Ulysses utilizes separate undo-cycles for the various views, you can even 1) delete a note, 2) continue writing in the editor, 3) click into the note pad and undo the deletion of the note.
  
  Last tip: Since the Note Pad is RTF, it will keep all formats applied to the text you're pasting into it. This can lead to strange results, especially when copying links from Safari or such, but also with regards to your preferred notes font.
  In order to paste text into the Note Pad while keeping the current format (of the notes), try using Command-Shift-V, which equals the menu command "Paste and Match Style".
  To paste a link URL rather than a clickable, linked text snippet into the Note Pad, first paste the URL into the "Excerpt" field, then move it to the notes.
  
  Learned some?
  Great. :)
Things you might not know about the Exporter
- There's an option to transform Markers into Start and stop tags in the "Marker styles" section of the Exporters. The option is called "Enclose in".
  What this does is it will strip the marker format and instead add the specified characters before and behind the marked text passage. This is especially useful when exporting to the Plain Text format, where markers would otherwise get lost (no formats in plain text, he).
  
  To define differing opening and closing character(s), simply put them together in the Character(s) column, but separate them by " - " (space dash space).
  Example: You have marked "this text passage".
  You want it enclosed in HTML- or LaTeX tags, which require explicit open- and close-tags, such as "<b>" and "</b>".
  To get this result, put both the start- and end-tag into the Character(s) column, seperated by *space dash space*: <b> - </b>