I do all my writing in Ulysses. I also like to keep all of my files in its library. Since I started using it, the idea of having individual files scattered about my computer is just plain barbaric. The cost of this trade off is that if Ulysses doesn’t support a feature, I have to add raw HTML into the files. Normally this isn’t much of a problem. A bit HTML set off with ~~ isn’t distracting.

Markdown is great for writing text, but as a human-readable HTML front end its features are limited. It’s also the best generic text format that I’ve found. The one overwhelming advantage of markdown is that it’s easy to remember. It’s also the native language of Ulysses.1

Between markdown, HTML, and Ulysses, there’s no native way to create a a table of contents. There’s not even a recognized standard. Maybe in the future Ulysses2 might add this. But for now it’s something that has to be added manually. So with little a bit of scripting I came up with a workable solution.

This is a simple script that takes markdown and returns it with a table contents added. It also adds in the needed anchor links so the navigation actually works.

Usage is simple. Just pipe in the markdown text and point the output to a new file.

Or you can do it all on the Mac’s clipboard and not use an intermediate file. This is a neat one-liner. (Make sure to copy as markdown.)

Then in Ulysses, select all of the text on the sheet. Then paste in the text generated by the script. Make sure to use paste from -> markdown.3

https://gist.github.com/2f3edf7df90740f345e5

This script will indent the TOC items using tabs instead of spaces. This is for Ulysses compatibility. Change the "\t" to " " for regular markdown.

Sample input:

Sample output:

This works for me, I hope someone else finds it useful.