Ulysses

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Build me a writing application that replaces Ulysses — and know why this is ALMOST.

The editor is buildable. What is not, quickly, is **a library that holds a whole book**: thousands of sheets, instant search, drag between groups, and nothing ever slow or lost. That reliability at scale, plus the export that turns a manuscript into a formatted document, is what the subscription buys.

STACK
- CodeMirror 6 as the editing engine, with decorations doing the rendering. Do not write a text editor
- A native application, or a PWA that works entirely offline
- SQLite on device with FTS5
- An optional sync server: Node 20+ with Fastify, storing ciphertext only

THE LIBRARY, WHICH IS THE PRODUCT
- The unit is a sheet, not a file: a chapter, a scene, a section. A book is a group of sheets in an order
- Groups nest, and a group can be a filter — a saved search that behaves like a folder. That is how a long manuscript stays navigable
- Thousands of sheets must load instantly. Index at write time, virtualise the list, and never scan on read
- Drag a sheet between groups, reorder within one, split a sheet in two and merge two into one. Splitting and merging are what writers actually do to a draft, and most applications make them awkward
- Word and character counts per sheet, per group and for the whole manuscript, computed at query time
- Never lose anything: every save keeps a version, and there is no delete that is not a trash with a retention

THE EDITOR
- Markdown rendered in place, with the syntax marks hidden except on the line the cursor is on. That reveal-on-cursor rule is the whole trick, and it is implemented as a decoration layer over plain text
- Attachments per sheet: notes, keywords, an image, a goal. Kept beside the text rather than inside it
- A goal per sheet or group — a word count with a progress ring — which is the feature that gets a book finished
- Focus mode dimming everything but the current paragraph, and typewriter mode keeping the cursor line centred
- No formatting toolbar. The point is that the writer never leaves the keyboard

EXPORT, THE OTHER HALF
- To PDF, DOCX, EPUB and HTML, from a style that is a file rather than a setting
- A style controls the type, the page, the heading hierarchy, the running header and the page numbers. Paged CSS for the PDF, with widows and orphans set to at least two — a heading alone at the foot of a page is the defect everybody notices
- EPUB properly: a table of contents built from the headings, correct metadata, and a file that passes a validator. An invalid EPUB is rejected by the shops
- Export a group and everything under it, in order, as one document. That is how a manuscript leaves
- Placeholders for a title, an author and a date, filled from the group's own metadata

SEARCH AND SAFETY
- FTS5 across every sheet, instant, with filters by group, keyword and date
- A filter saved as a group, so 'every scene tagged unfinished' is a place rather than a query you retype
- Everything is plain text underneath. Whatever the storage format, an export to a directory of Markdown files must be one command, and it must round-trip
- Backups automatic and local as well as any sync

SYNC
- End-to-end encrypted: the server stores ciphertext and reads nothing
- Ordered by a server counter, never a device clock
- Conflicts keep both versions as a conflict copy and say so. Never merge, never silently choose — this holds somebody's book
- Works entirely without it

WHAT NOT TO ADD
- Collaboration. This is a tool for one person writing something long, and every collaborative feature makes the single-writer case worse
- Analytics. A writing application knows what you are working on

OPERATIONS
- If there is a server: .env with DATABASE_PATH, BASE_URL, SESSION_SECRET; migrations on boot; nightly backup of ciphertext

WHAT MATTERS MOST
The library at scale and the export. Put a real manuscript in it — a hundred thousand words across two hundred sheets — and confirm search, reordering and export are all instant. Then export it and read the PDF.