Comparing Ulysses with Scrivener

I was a Ulysses user for a couple of years, until they went to a subscription plan, and that pissed me off, so I left for Scrivener. After reading some posts here on micro.blog about the superiority of Ulysses, I decided to give it a try again. (Perhaps because of the influence of @jack, I am becoming a software and platform tester?) I’m not ready to leave Scrivener, but I am going to use Ulysses for much of my everyday writing tasks and stop using IA Writer.

This post might not help you decide which of these two platforms is best for your work. Both are designed by people who clearly care about writing and who have given the writing process much thought. For long form, they both do something marvelous: You can write in small pieces and glue those pieces together. You can also write in large rivers and split up the river into tributaries. Your research lives in the same digital space and is searchable. And you can reorder scenes and chapters easily. If you ever wrote scenes on index cards and tacked them up to the wall, then moved them around until your story came together, you’ll be right at home with Scrivener or Ulysses.

I’ll try to give you a working perspective of each.

The Big Picture

Since I am a visual thinker when I write, Scrivener has an edge for me there. I like displaying my outlines as…