I’ve been using Lettera for my professional writing work for about a month now. The very rare bug reports – kudos to the team! – are going through TestFlight. So, here I wanted to give some general feedback on some of the issues in using Lettera as a writer.
For context, I’ve been using Lettera mostly with folders on disk, and mostly for content writing of marketing and learning content. Single text documents range from a few paragraphs up to 3000+ words.
As a writer, I tend to use a number of Markdown compatible tools that Lettera could potentially replace: Ulysses, Obsidian, and VS Code. I also use Bear for writing short texts.
Before I list the issues, let’s start with some positives. I know Lettera is in Beta and not full-featured yet, but it is already a very good writing tool. The UI feels polished (like Bear), and the experience of writing in Lettera is really very pleasant – I want to come back to it, which is an important factor in a good app, as the makers of Bear probably know only too well. Lettera has also been stable in my experience, and it is very intuitive to use.
Moreover, the ability to work on disk is a big plus because I can share the folder with Claude (my preferred local LLM) and actively work on docs together with AI. (I can do this on disk with Ulysses and VS Code too. In Bear and Obsidian, I use MCP/CLI a lot these days). Being file-based means I can use Git to provide a good level of version control and visibility on what the LLM has changed (GitHub Desktop works well for this), and if I need more complex text processing I can open files in VS Code and use multiple cursors, regex, and all the rest.
So, good for writing, good for integrating, nice to look at, and stable… Lettera is off to a great start. Kudos again!
Now the cons. There are some issues with Lettera that have repeatedly bugged me while trying to use it as my main writing workhorse. Combined these would stop me from replacing Ulysses as my primary commercial writing tool for now, but clearly Lettera is still in Beta. Anyway, here they are in order of importance (for me). Perhaps others will also hope to see some of them resolved.
Issues
– Outline Navigation (the single biggest issue in my daily work): The inability to navigate the Inspector (sidebar) with the keyboard is really frustrating (and also the main reason why I don’t use Bear for long form writing, as it suffers from the same feature lack). When writing longer docs with a lot of headings, writers frequently want to jump quickly between sections to see what they’ve written. In Ulysses, it is as simple as cmd+8 then use the arrows or type a few letters of the heading’s text. VS Code has something similar (cmd+shift+o) and Obsidian has a plugin. In Bear, you hit shift+cmd+a then can do nothing with it and have to reach for the mouse (yes, I put in a feature request several times for this). In Lettera, for now, I don’t even see a keybinding to open the Inspector, let alone navigate without the mouse. Lettera needs the ability to do both (as does Bear!).
– Quick Open of files by filename in the current project/folder: I appreciate I can navigate to the sidebar with the keyboard, but something like Bear’s cmd+o would improve workflow significantly
– Find content in files: Search in the currently active folder by content. I assume this is coming. Perhaps it’s already hidden somewhere but I can’t locate it. I’d put this down as essential. I type “Bear” and it finds all docs with “Bear” in their content.
– Ability to toggle paragraph numbers in the margin. Nice to have.
– Copy file path with contextual menu item (with modifier required if you want to hide it) or keybinding: Given how much we all work with LLMs these days, being able to quickly grab the file path to share with an LLM via a right click or keybinding is something I’ve found myself reaching for again and again. For now I have to open the file in Finder then select and copy path from there.
– Themes: I imagine these are coming. The current dark/light contrast is too hard for my eyes.
– Tags/Keywords: Lettera would replace Obsidian for me, but not without tags. Even access to Apple system tags would be a start.
– Folding on heading level: nice to have, if it can come over from Bear
– Typewriter mode: Ability to keep cursor in center of frame. CTRL+l does work and is good to have. Typewriter mode would be better still.
– Hide YAML Front matter: I have a lot of files with YAML front matter that I don’t want to see when I am writing. Lettera already formats this differently (like Bear), which is welcome. Hiding it would be even more welcome.
– File>Open Recent: could use a modifier to allow for “Open in New Window” rather than having to create a new window first then go to the menu.
So there’s my shortlist for now. Hope it’s useful. I think Lettera is off to a flying start, and look forward to working with it as it evolves.
– Patrick
on a heading in the TOC moves the cursor there. I’m not sure why that didn’t land in Bear, I’ll have a look 