Thoughts on migrating from Ulysses

That is exactly what I would expect. Good interface design there!

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I had forgotten tools-merge, and there’s something really cool. If you set the sort option to unsorted, you can drag and rearrange the files however you want. Then, tools-merge merges them in that order.

Go back to sort by name if you want, and the unsorted order you set will come back when you go back to unsorted mode.

Nice.

Yep. From Help > Documentation > Menus > The Tools Menu

It would be nice to have transclusion working in DT3 (part of the MMD 6), but this can be overcome by letting the files in an indexed folder and then using Multimarkdown Composer ou nvUltra to view them.

This seems to make writing longer essays in DT a task more feasible. As it is right now, you can’t properly view all the parts together if you can’t keep them in different files.

In Scrivener, Ulysses, Tinderbox or Connected Text this would be easy.

Intersting idea - can you expand on how you would do this?

@cgrunenberg would have to assess the feasibility of implementing this.

Just to follow up: I played around with export (or Quick Export as it shows up in Ulysses’ menu), and it works, except that the hierarchical structure is lost if you export from “the top-level”.

So if you care about preserving the hierarchical structure, as far as I can tell, you’d have to export individual sheets.

(For most of the stuff I care about though, the top-level export is good enough)

This will be very cool.

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Forgive me, complete n00b here. I see how I can save files in the “inbox”, but I’m unclear on how I can save in any sort of folder structure outside that. Is it possible?

Welcome @randallb

The Global Inbox is the only inbox that can be directly saved to.

‘index files and folders’ was exactly what I was looking for. It’s perfect honestly.

That’s an option to exercise for sure.

When you create a DT database, you can have as many groups (folders) in there as you want.

Also, if you add a folder to your favorites, it will appear as a drag-and-drop destination in the “sorter”.

I think I said all there is to it, but here are some screen caps demonstrating.

Does it help?

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Here’s another thing to keep in mind. Devonthink can handle anything you can copy to your disk.

Scrivener files can be stored in Devonthink, and Devonthink will synchronize them to sync stores.

Literature and Latte would probably not endorse the practice. I’ve had no trouble - and I also keep backups.

I loved Ulysses but am not a fan of the subscription model, and like yourself, I found myself preferring a writing database that I could also easily include other items (you can technically include some external files in Ulysses). Also, since DEVONThink is using MultiMarkdown, I find it much more portable. Ulysses has some custom changes to Markdown.

I currently use iA Writer on my iPad, with DTTG as a location source. I use MultiMarkdown Composer + Marked as a previewer. Sometimes I will use SublimeText but Composer is made by the same person that develops MultiMarkdown.

They have a knowledgebase article on the topic, actually:

https://scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb/cloud-syncing/using-scrivener-with-cloud-sync-services

which is probably good reading for using an external sync service with pretty much any app. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the link - great advice.

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DevonTHINK is reasonable as a long-form writing programme (as long as you don’t need to use the iOS app - though I believe they are working on fixing that). I’d say the main limitations are twofold:

  1. Limited formatting interface. You can change the fonts manually, but Styles are extremely inconvenient to access (you have to click through several menus just to change the Style once).

  2. More importantly for long-form writing, no sub-notes. This is where OneNote and Scrivener excel, as you can break up your writing into smaller chunks that always stay together (and in the right order). Great for preventing clutter, as you can hide the sub-notes in the menu/outliner when not needed. In Scrivener, you can highlight multiple notes and it presents the combined text in one continuous scroll, allowing you to read everything you have written without clicking between documents. This is why I rely on DevonTHINK mainly for storing research articles and web clippings, but do most of my thesis writing in Scrivener and take notes in OneNote.

If DevonTHINK introduced some of those Scrivener features, I might consider switching to it for my long-form writing. Still, if you don’t need any of those fancy features it should be fine.

With DevonThink for Mac, you can create a group for an article, short story, essay, book, etc, and include each section of the book as a separate document. You can set the sort order to “unsorted,” which is the same thing as manual sorting.

Doesn’t that provide “sub-notes” capability?