On iOS, iA Writer includes a Command Keyboard that can be used to insert common markdown tags, special characters that are hard to get to on the iOS keyboard, etc. Moving files within the app on the iPad is not very intuitive. If I do decide to reorganize my file system that will definitely be a task to do on the Mac. Thankfully, iA Writer’s file search capabilities are quite good and very easily accessible from anywhere within the app. This worked well with Bear’s tagging system, but I’m not sure this is the best way to do things in a files and folder system like iA Writer’s. I’ve got stuff broken up into a lot of different, very specific folders, with lots of folders at the top level and, in some cases, nested quite deep. I may need to rethink my organizational scheme to work better with folders.
I like the results of iA Writer’s Word export quite a bit better than Bear or Ulysses. It’s very common for something I write at work to start as a Markdown text document, then get exported to Microsoft Word to share with my colleagues. This is especially great on the iPad which lacks some more traditional text manipulation capabilities that you can do with a mouse. Copy and paste work fine though, and I really like the ability to move lines (or highlighted blocks of text) up and down with the keyboard. Most annoyingly, the iOS app sometimes freezes when I try to drag and drop text, either within the app or dragging to another app in split view. All headings look the same and are basically just shown in bold. One area where I wish they’d go a little further with the Markdown highlighting is to do a better job visually differentiating between different levels of Markdown heading. On the functional side, I like the fact that iA Writer uses vanilla Markdown with some very lightweight highlighting rather than trying to do something fancy and different the way Ulysses does (and Bear, to a lesser extent). It’s rather monochromatic compared to Bear’s nice use of accent colors. Perhaps this is not very consequential, but I don’t think iA Writer looks a nice as Bear.
#IA WRITER IOS MANUAL#
I did have to do some manual tweaking afterwards, but I managed to translate my nested tag structure into nested folders a lot more easily than if I’d tried to do it manually. The script created a folder in the iA Writer iCloud Drive directory for each tag (and within each of those folders for each subtag) and copied the text files into the appropriate folders. I wrote a Python script that identified the tags by looking for lines starting with a hashtag that was not followed by a space or another hashtag (which would be Markdown headings rather than tags).
To do this, I first made sure that everything had a tag of some sort, then exported all of it to a folder on my hard drive. I decided to try to turn my Bear tagging system into nested folders in iA Writer. iA Writer also doesn’t allow for nested tags, which I use pretty heavily in Bear (a “work” tag with separate tags within it for individual projects, for instance). While iA Writer supports tags, they’re clearly secondary to the file/folder structure. Rather than files and folders, Bear has a flat list of documents organized using tags. Ulysses was simple, I just exported my files to iA Writer’s iCloud Drive folder and they showed up in the app.īear was a bit harder because it has a very different metaphor. The first step in this process was to move my existing files from Ulysses and Bear over to iA Writer.
#IA WRITER IOS MAC#
It has both Mac and iOS apps, which is a hard and fast requirement for me these days. I liked the idea of an editor that stores files in iCloud Drive and plays nicely with iOS features like Open in Place. I picked iA Writer in part because of some of the things Federico Viticci has written about it. In late 2018 I decided to give iA Writer a try. I dislike the non-standard way it handles Markdown links, for example. There are also a few things about Ulysses in particular that rubbed me the wrong way. Both these apps worked well for me individually, but even though I had drawn a pretty clear line between them having two different writing environments did introduce a bit of friction. Bear for note taking and shorter form stuff Ulysses for long-form writing. In the past few years, I’d been doing most of my writing in a combination of Bear and Ulysses.
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