Ulysses is one of the most flexible apps for composing and managing prose. Bloggers love it for its Markdown support and ability to upload posts directly to WordPress, Medium and other platforms. Writers of long-form works appreciate that the app can break chapters and sections into separate documents, corral those into groups and export everything into multiple formats.

Here are a few of our favourite features from Ulysses’ expansive toolbox.

Ulysses’ Dashboard (View > Dashboard > Show Dashboard) is a one-stop shop for information about your current document (Ulysses calls documents “sheets”). At a glance, you can see statistics like word count, along with an outline and lists of all media, links, footnotes and annotations in your document.

Click any Dashboard tab – Progress, Outline, Annotations or Attachments – for more options, all without leaving your sheet.

Even the best first draft can use a little polish; that’s where Revision mode comes in.

Just switch to Revision mode (View > Dashboard > Revision Mode) and click Check Text. Ulysses performs a thorough grammar and style review, alerting you to potential issues with grammar, spelling, commonly confused words and much more. And it works in over 20 languages!

While writing, you sometimes want to see a different chapter or page without losing your place. Ulysses’ split view makes this easy.

While viewing a sheet, choose View > Second Editor (or press Command-Option-3) to split the Ulysses document area in two. Your current sheet is on the left; click any sheet in your Ulysses library to view it on the right.

Prefer a top/bottom split to left/right? Click the button at the top of the active sheet that looks like two rings, then choose Second Editor on Bottom.

Pro tip: To quickly switch which of the two documents you’re working in, press Command-Option-Left/Right; hold down Option to scroll through both sheets at the same time.

Sometimes a table is the best way to show information, and Ulysses makes it easy to add a table to any sheet: just type (tbl) (including the parentheses) where you want the table to appear. By default the table is three columns by four rows, but you can adjust the size (and add a caption) by clicking anywhere in the table header. Click in any field to add content.

Applying keywords to your sheets (Edit > Attach > Keywords, or press Shift-Command-K) gives you powerful search options.

To show only sheets with a specific tag, click the filter button above the sheet list, then click the tag icon next to the search field and click the desired tag. Select a sheet group to restrict the search to that group.

If you find yourself regularly performing a particular search, create a one-click bookmark for it by setting up a filter view (File > New Filter).

Using the Keyword Manager (Window > Keyword Manager), you can rename and choose a colour for any keyword. But one of the most useful features is the ability to merge.

For example, if you decide that you don’t really need both “fiction” and “writing” tags, Command-click them, choose Merge from the action menu (...) and name your new combo.

Keyword colours make it easier to find a tagged sheet, but they also have a hidden power: they let you effectively group keywords.

For example, make all your music-related keywords (jazz, pop, music, concert) blue, then click the blue circle below the search field to display all sheets tagged with blue keywords.

When composing a blog post, you can easily drop in an image. But if that image is already online or uploaded to a server, adding it is even easier.

Just type (img) (including the parentheses) and click “URL” in the panel that appears. Paste the image’s URL, add a caption, and optionally add a title and custom dimensions by clicking the plus-sign button.