Short form Writing

Right. I’ve settled back to Obsidian for taking or making notes. I use Obsidian as a sort of digital commonplace notebook. Reading. Observations. Thoughts. I pull them together into the app, either directly, or through Drafts, or from a notebook or a Post it.

I could develop these ideas into posts inside Obsidian. My new stripped down look doesn’t distract, and Markdown is Markdown. I can easily include the post folders in the Obsidian vault, and thereby access them from any number of applications.

However, Obsidian is my personal space, then I have some folders on my drive that are my public space. I write public posts in Ulysses, and publish directly to my sites from the app. I save the documents in MD format on my hard drive. As per Obsidian, I use a minimal setup with no clutter. The only “chrome” is a word count in the top right hand corner of the page. Keeping them separate fits the way that I think, and lessens the chance of back linking syntax and the like slipping into material to be published.

I’d left Ulysses, because it uses a weird sort of proprietary Markdown, and the files are a little bit weird. All of which is true, except a facility exists to make it fully Markdown compatible and to use good old fashion files on the hard disk. As per Obsidian, I had become frustrated with all the stuff that I perceived as clutter on the interface.

Then I discovered Paper. Oh my. This is a beautiful app. Gorgeously minimalist, elegant and quiet. It’s lovely. Works on files on the hard disk. My heart leaped. A new shiny application. The answer to all my troubles. I wonder how much it is?

Ah.

£4.49 per month or

£49.99 per annum.

Ouch.

Lifetime? £89.99. Hmm…

But it does work on IOS too. Wait? Another subscription? The same again?

Double Ouch.

Ordinarily, I would simply have paid lifetime for both, but well, you know, things don’t look particularly rosy on the economic front, and my inner operations manager was doing a good job of calming down his flouncy alter-ego.

Surely I could make one of the many writing apps look as good? IA Writer? Craft? Byword? Focused? Typora? Exactly as with the note taking applications, the answer was the one that I was using. Five minutes fiddling with the settings of Ulysses, and I had a stripped down, uncluttered friendly interface, working off files saved on my hard disk.

Old flouncy-pants is much quieter now.

Next - what about long form writing?

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