Ishmael ➹

Ishmael caught my attention because it takes one of iA Writer’s best qualities–an editor that disappears while I am writing–and applies it to an entire manuscript, with chapters, outlines, bookmarks, notes and export to Word, EPUB, HTML and Markdown. I usually begin long pieces in iA Writer and finish them in VS Code, with folders, filenames and scripts holding everything together, so I am curious to see how much of that clutter Ishmael can replace.

It was created by the genius Will McGugan, who also created Rich, Textual and PyFilesystem. I don’t write novels, but I have demonstrably spent over two decades writing fairly long pieces here, and Ishmael focuses on things I care about: organising a messy draft, reading it without editing clutter and leaving the sentences to me. I can’t wait to see if there is going to be an iPad version.