Concatenation as in Ulysses

APG

When in the Archive I select two or more notes, the right panel indicates the number of notes selected. But in Ulysses, the selected notes are concatened and displayed in order, and I can modify them and even export them as a whole (but I can't copy all notes together, that's the limit). For this, Ulysses allows the reordering of notes by drag and drop.

This behavior is for me the most important strength of Ulysses, the main reason I'm using it for writing books and long articles. I imagine it would be very difficult (impossible?) to make The Archive behave this way, but do you know other Markdown editors doing it? (In Zettlr, it's not possible to select multiple notes, except at export and only if the folder has been declared as a project: far to be as intuitive and natural as in Ulysses).

Andy

A couple of years ago I heard about an Obsidian plugin, Longform, that compiles in a way like what you described. I have not used it, so I don't know how usable it is. I doubt somewhat that it would be a satisfactory replacement for Ulysses. I use Scrivener for writing publications, and its Scrivenings mode is like what you described, but technically it's not a Markdown editor (even though I write in Markdown in it).

There was a feature request for The Archive: "[REQUEST] View the text of multiple notes as one document in the one window" (April 2018). And here's another discussion that was a little relevant: "Plain text alternative to Scrivener's 'Scrivenings' and its ability to rearrange and order files?" (January 2022).

APG

Thanks Andy!

I can see that I'm not the only one having this request: I've had a look at the links and found many interesting ideas.

I've configured Marked 2 with LeanPub support which allows to export multiple documents (it works, GitBook support did not). It's external, so not as easy as Ulysses, but on par with Zettlr (I've already downloaded Obsidian but not tested it yet).

GeoEng51

Scrivener has the capability that you are describing.

APG

Yes, Scrivener and Ulysses seems to be the only ones doing it naturally.

A few years ago I had chosen Ulysses because Scrivener didn't have markdown support at this time (I do not know which one I would choose now).

KillerWhale

@APG Beware, Scrivener still does not have true Markdown support. It will parse Markdown upon export, but will not show parse it while you're typing (as far as I have found).

mediapathic

@APG doesn't really answer your question but FYI, iA Writer recently rolled out a similar feature (mentioned weirdly just in passing here and nowhere else as far as I can tell) whereby you have a list in a text file that previews as concatenated files. Almost certainly not worth paying for iA Writer for, but if you're like me and have an old license it might be worth playing with.

ctietze

"Transclusion" is also a technical term to search for if you want to maintain a file that lists other files in order to assemble a document.

APG

Thanks all for the comments. There are solutions for transclusion, which is an intermediary between concatenation of files and what I was talking about, but the complete GUI integration seems to exist only in Ulysses and Scrivener (which is not full markdown but appears to have much more features than Ulysses).

GeoEng51

@APG Just to be clear about what you can and cannot do with markdown files in Scrivener, for those who aren't familiar with it:

1. You can drag and drop any markdown file into Scrivener and see all the text, as written. Scrivener does not interpret any of the Markdown formatting - you see the "raw text", so to speak.
2. When you want to output any text that you have created in Scrivener, you have an option to create a Multimarkdown compatible file, (along with many other file types).

The real power of Scrivener is in importing separate text files, moving them around, seeing them separately or in combination, etc. It is a true writer's app. Many times I have dropped in several zettels, moved them around into a logical sequence, edited as necessary and filled in the "gaps" between the zettels, to create a final product. Then the options for output to different file formats are almost endless.

Scrivener is a wonderful app that I use almost daily in my work. Even when interacting with work colleagues who are stuck in the Microsoft world, I prefer to write in Scrivener and then export to a Word document.

Note also that Scrivener is not just for importing text. You can bring in files and images of almost any type for viewing and reference while you are doing your writing tasks.

Finally, Scrivener stores all of its text "segments" as individual text files. These are wrapped together in a container which looks like one file but which can be opened like a folder so that you can see and access all the individual text files using "Show Package Contents".

APG

@GeoEng51 Thanks! I've just tested Octarine which is nice (for the moment it's a kind of small Obsidian) but it does not have this functionality. Too bad: I also use it a lot in Ulysses.