Tabularia compared with Ulysses

A library of sheets, and a manuscript

Ulysses is a Markdown writing app for Apple devices, and its organizing idea is the library. You write in sheets — small pieces of Markdown — gathered into groups and filters, and a piece of work is however many sheets you decide belong to it, glued together when you export or publish. For essays, posts, and writing that arrives in parts, it is a comfortable way to work.

Tabularia's organizing idea is the manuscript. A project holds one continuous typeset composition with a book's structure inside it — books, acts, chapters, scenes — and the outline, minimap, search and working scope all move through that one composition. A chapter is not a file you assemble later; it is a level of the thing you are already looking at.

What happens when you revise

Ulysses keeps versions of a sheet and lets you restore one, which covers the case where you want yesterday's wording back.

Tabularia treats revision as most of the job, and a draft is not a copy you restore over the top of your work. It holds an alternative version of whatever you scoped it to, one paragraph or the entire book, and you take it back a difference at a time or all at once. Usually that means keeping the sentences that came out better and leaving the rest. Snapshots cover yesterday's wording. A collaborator you invite works in a draft of their own and returns a redline you read against your own words, and needs no paid account to do it. Timelines and anchors follow a character's arc or a plot thread through the passages that carry them, so you can see what a change disturbs before you make it.

Why to switch

Ulysses posts straight from the editor to WordPress, Ghost and Medium, which is how it handles publishing. Tabularia publishes a reader page of its own instead, with reading controls and chapter navigation, and integrations elsewhere are planned.

If you came to Ulysses for the calm, you keep it here. Tabularia is as simple or as powerful as you want: Focus Mode clears the screen down to the page and the Compass, the small disc in the corner, and from the Compass you reveal one surface at a time when you need it. Nothing else returns until you ask.

Switch when the book has outgrown its sheets. Instead of a filter to find a chapter, there is an Outline that goes there in a click and a Minimap showing where you are in the whole of it. Pin one character's timeline as your Working Scope and you read their chapters end to end, with the rest held back until you widen again. The people and places you need to check sit in Sheets one panel from the page, and a long manuscript scrolls and types as quickly near the end as at the start. It also sets the page as the book while you write on it, and it runs on Windows, Linux and Android, which Ulysses does not.

Exporting a Ulysses group

Select the group that holds the book and press ⇧⌘P. TextBundle keeps the Markdown exactly as you wrote it; DOCX suits a manuscript with its headings already styled. Either one imports as a single new project.

Chapters come from the shallowest heading level the text uses more than once, so a group of sheets that each open on ## Chapter lands as one Chapter per sheet.

Staying with Ulysses for now

• Is there Ulysses for Windows or Android?
• How do I get a standard manuscript DOCX out of Ulysses?