Ulysses III vs Visual Studio Code

A few themes are baked in and a big selection of user-contributed styles to choose from are available on the Ulysses Style Exchange.

Ulysses has a clean, unobtrusive, easy to overview interface that allows focusing on writing. By default it's split up in 3 panes with sidebar, sheet pane and content pane from left to right. Unnecessary panes can be hidden.

Markdown formatting can be applied from the right-click menu, with keyboard shortcuts or from an optional markup bar. Necessary elemants to links, images, and footnotes are added by filling in a popover.

Pasted rich text and imported Word documents keep their formatting when converted to Markdown.

Attachments such as images, text notes, keywords and writing goals can be added to content. And to organize them keywords can be added.

Ulysses saves everything in the app so there's no file management outside of the editor involved. It organizes content in groups (folders) and sheets (files), has a powerful, easy to use search and allows adding keywords to attachments to help them be organized and found quickly.

Groups can have an unlimited amount of subgroups and the title of subgroup shows up in the pane view. Sheets can be split up, merged, glued together and easily moved around in the sheet pane by dragging and dropping. Great for splitting up larger documents into manageable chunks while still keeping an overview of the whole project and having the ability to move sections around quickly.

Contents of a group can be filtered by text, keywords or change date within headings, code blocks, images or any other marked up text. Filters can contain a combination of conditions and be saved to make a new group. Saved filters can be moved around to different groups and will return filtered results for that group. Selecting multiple groups will show the combined sheets of those groups.

You can operate Ulysses via keyboard only. No need for mouse.

The editor can export to Plain Text, RTF, Word, HTML, ePub and PDF with customizable styles for each option. It can also preview HTML directly in the browser.

There's no live-preview pane or an external previewer necessary. Ulysses displays styling inline.

Ulysses has options for highlighting current line, showing line numbers and enabling typewriter mode. Typewriter mode defines a place on the screen where the cursor should be so eyes are kept focusing in one place on the screen.

Content can be synchronised across devices via Apple's iCloud.

Ulysses comes with an excellently written documentation that covers everything there is to know about the software, including an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts as well as short and sweet introduction to Markdown and its benefits.

Ulysses is available for both macOS and iOS. This, combined with the cloud syncing allows users to work on their projects using any Apple device they have at the time.

The editor tracks statistics that shows how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages a document contains and estimated reading time for slow, average, and fast readers. The statistics display in a popover that can be torn-off so it's constantly visible.

Goals such as how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines or pages should be written can be set to help get motivated.

Groups, tagging, and notes for each document.

Staff is helpful in answering questions on how to use the app.

A time (10hrs) and usage limited demo for Ulysses III is available.

Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality.

There is very solid TypeScript integration in Visual Studio Code. Both are developed by Microsoft and VSC itself is written in TypeScript.

VSC includes debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript.

You don't need to configure and add plugins before being productive. However, you can add plugins if needed but for the basics you're well covered.

There's no need to press alt+tab to go to a terminal: it is directly integrated into the editor. Shift+~ is a handy hotkey to toggle the integrated terminal.

For a 'wrapped' web-based application, Visual Studio Code performs very well.

Released under the MIT License.

VS-Code has the speed of Sublime and the power of WebStorm. Perhaps this is the best software that Microsoft has ever created.

JavaScript IntelliSense allows Visual Studio Code to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code.

Visual Studio Code has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.

There's a new release of Visual Studio Code every month. If you are one of the insiders then releases are daily.

ESLint integrates great. You can define your rules trough .eslintrc.* as usual and vs code will autofix your code on save. So your code is always in style.

Extensions are written in either Typescript or JavaScript.

It's really nice to see how the code editor evolves. Every month there is a new version with great communication of new features and changes.

Task runners display lists of available tasks and performing these tasks is as simple as a click of the mouse.

All it takes is one stop for all the features many people need.

Snippets are templates that will insert text for you and adapt it to their context, and in VSC they are highly customizable.

The ease of getting assistance and finding tutorials is increasing as the community grows.

It leverages TypeScript compiler functionality to statically type check JS (type inference, JSDoc types) with "javascript.implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true option.

Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension.

The Omnisharp plugin is very powerful providing full sln, csproj, and project.json support.

It supports pretty web rtl languages like arabic languages when most of other editors don't support it.

These features allow you to have a glance at code without opening it as a whole in a separate tab. Moreover, editing is allowed.