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. 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.

Iawriter app