Finding myself make a bullet list of my ideal “project-based writing app,” i.e., like Scrivener but with some of the features I wish it had. I wish apps like iA Writer & Ulysses would step up their search-and-replace game in particular (grep, multi-file search, etc.).
@chipotle I'm gonna throw in a suggestion - Scrivener has an open-in-external editor thingy, right? Why not open all the text files in Sublime Text (or Atom or VS Code) and use their search-and-replace-in-all-files features?
@nitinkhanna I'm not sure Scrivener actually does; it's designed for rich text editing. (It nominally supports Markdown, but it isn't very happy about it.) I suspect iA Writer would be a better choice if I wanted to go that way because it works with standard files and folders—I could just open one of its folders in BBEdit. But it's just mildly annoying that none of these otherwise pretty powerful prose-focused editors are as good at editing as most full-featured word processors are. Microsoft Word, for all the antipathy directed at it (oft justifiably), has advanced search operators which are basically regex in disguise, for instance. And Nota Bene, a DOS word processor I was using in 1994 (!), had the concept of folder-based projects with multifile search and replace. I'd like to see modern prose text editors start competing a bit more on functionality than beauty. :)
