Ulysses 3, a text editor for Mac OS X

Ulysses 3 lives up to its hype. I can comfortably say that it’s the best Mac text editor around, and if you don’t need the few features that I rely on, then you’re golden. Seriously, just go and buy this thing before the price goes up to $40 next week.

Ulysses 3 treats your text like a RAW image file.

The level of polish is astonishing, and you’ll keep finding things to make you smile long after you get started. Keyboard shortcuts for everything make nerds happy, and the visual feedback will please everyone.

One thing kept ticking at the back of my mind as I wrote this review: Ulysses (and Markdown in general) treat plain text as the unpolluted source of your work. I keep thinking of RAW files in photography, which contain all the data there is about the photo, but no actual picture. The photo is only formed when you interpret that RAW data and “export” it in the form you want (JPG, TIFF).

In this analogy, Ulysses is not an app like Lightroom. It’s like the camera. Except that it’s a camera that has been designed from scratch to work in a way that helps you make photos. And until now, all word processors have been designed to help you print, not make. Welcome to the future of writing.