I draft in Drafts, take notes in Bear and write long form in Ulysses

People often compare Bear and Ulysses. I too. I keep trying which one shall I use to write my books and store my daily thoughts and ideas. I also compare them with Drafts to see if I can write long form writings in Drafts with its workspace feature. At the end, I use all of them, with different purposes. They are all great apps in each of their own category.

Drafts is text based and no way to store images. It shines when I need to write things out and draft short series of writings with tags and workspaces. Drafts app launches really fast and provides a robust and focus environment to let me write until I save it to elsewhere.

Bear is very good for notes taking. It could store any files and texts into groups with nested tags until they need to be archived or move beyond Bear for post processing. The sync is solid and reliable that fits my writing habits that I use multiple devices at the same time. In terms of writing, Bear lacks good typography options and it hurts the writing experience. I install iA’s Quattro font in Drafts app and Ulysses.

While Drafts is a good place to start, and Bear is good to store anything generic. Ulysses is the go-to place to store all long form writings. I store my books, courses, slides in Ulysses and export them as PDFs for review. The group and smart group allows me to store my writings into very well organized way. Afterwards, I create post process script to compile the exported text bundle from Ulysses into destination format. For example, LeanPub’s markdown with corrected images paths.