More Power to Ulysses’ Filters: Exclude Keywords or Text Occurrences

Ulysses’ filters can help you organize your work. They let you track the texts you want to keep your eye on. In Ulysses 2.8, we’ve added a new trait: You can now create filters based on negative criteria. That’s right! We’ve made it easier to sort out all the texts you don’t want to see.

Filters, as a reminder, let you sort your sheets according to certain criteria: text occurrences, keywords, or creations dates. Their uses are numerous and versatile. As a blogger, you can filter for blog posts with a keyword “In Progress”. As a novelist, you may want to filter incidents based on your main character’s name, to follow her or his actions through the course of the story. What’s new is that you can also collect sheets that do not contain a word or phrase, or that are not tagged with a certain keyword.

How to Use Filters

Adding a filter is very simple. Go to the “File” menu and select “New Filter”, or right-click on the group you want the filter to live in, and select “New Filter…” from the context menu. Now, you can determine the filter conditions — for example, use “Text does not contain” to include all novel scenes where a certain character is not present. Or “Keywords do not contain” to only show blog posts that have not yet been tagged as “Finished” — thus identifying those that still need some work. And so on. For a detailed search you can combine various positive or negative criteria to your liking.