I agree with Federico Viticci that Ulysses is a great plain text writing app, and version 2.6 makes it even better. I bought both the Mac and iOS versions earlier this year, and began using it for both professional and personal writing. It provides a consistent, tight writing experience on both the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

But the more I wrote in Ulysses, the more this closing thought from Jason Snell’s early 2015 review of Ulysses began echoing in my head:

Futureproofing is a big worry for me. And that’s why it might be dumb for me to do all my writing in Ulysses — sure, it’s possible for me to get my writing out if I stop using Ulysses. But is it practical?

So eventually I stopped doing much personal writing in Ulysses because most of my personal writing is highly fragmented—bits and pieces of thoughts that sometimes sit idle for years before coalescing with other things. On one hand, this makes the Ulysses “sheet” concept perfect for the way I write, but it gets harder to fight the constant worry of always having access to those thoughts. That’s why I love open plain text storage of notes—I never have to worry about solving a tricky batch export from a proprietary system.

Since the time I started using Ulysses, I assumed there was no batch export of sheets because there’s nothing in the UI to indicate that, and Jason’s comments lead me to believe sheets could only be exported one at a time (perhaps that was true in 2015).

Fortunately you can batch export any group of Ulysses sheets to plain text by simply dragging them to an external folder. You have to add the external folder to Ulysses first. (You can’t just drag into the Finder because you’ll get unreadable .ulysses files.)

Simple, effective, and future-proof enough for me.

2016 is a great year for writing apps. Scrivener is also better than ever with its awesome new iOS app. There’s no reason not to try them all. Whatever it takes to keep writing—do that.