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For a looong time, I did ALL of my writing in Ulysses. It has a great user interface, was available on iOS & Mac (so I could grab my iPad and go write at a coffee shop when I wanted to), and gave me a bunch of additional features like reading time and writing goals that made writing easier. It provides a great balance between powerful features and clean user interface that makes it easy to focus on your words.
But there are a few things that irk me about it.
For one thing, it always kinda bothered me how Ulysses didn’t use standard Markdown formatting for images. Which means that if I wanted to take my text and move it to another app, I’d have to reformat the Markdown to get it to work (which kind of defeats the whole point of Markdown in the first place). It also stores your text files as a proprietary Ulysses file format, which locks you into using the app.
So when Ulysses switched to a subscription pricing model a few years back, I figured it might be time to find another writing app.
Eventually, I landed on Obsidian - but not without some major hesitation.
When I first stumbled onto it, I initially wrote it off as a writing app (it was too complicated). But I do really enjoy having my notes and my writing projects together in the same place, so I committed and decided to stick with it.
Every word I’ve published in the last 2 years has started off in Obsidian.
And slowly, over time, I’ve figured out how to add back those features I missed from Ulysses.
In this newsletter, I’m going to share exactly what I did so you can follow along and turn Obsidian into the ultimate writing app.
First, there are a couple of key settings you’ll need to configure:
Once you have those key settings dialed in, there are a few Core Plugins you’ll want to configure. Here are a few recommendations for modifying the Core plugins:
Where things really get exciting though is with the Community plugins. Here are some recommended Community plugins that can add Ulysses-style features into Obsidian.
If you want to see these plugins in action, I recorded a YouTube video which demonstrates what all these settings and plugins do:
— Mike
A weekly newsletter where I help people apply values-based productivity principles and systems for personal growth, primarily using Obsidian. Subscribe if you want to make more of your notes and ideas.
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