How I Set Up Logseq for Long-form Writing

The bliss of writing in a cozy digital home

I’ve been using Logseq for all my writing needs for more than a year now, and I’m still loving it. It’s true, Logseq has an outliner nature that doesn’t go well with long-form writing, but this has never been a problem.

I use this amazing app as my daily logbook, where the outliner power shines brightly paired with the /Current time command, which adds the exact time. I use it for journaling where the bullets don’t receive a time stamp because I want thoughts to flow freely — a bullet for a thought. But I also write my Medium stories and short stories in Logseq without any problems.

It’s simple, but not always straightforward, and I’ve used various methods over the months. I have to be honest and admit that I went back to the first method I used. It’s the most natural for me.

It’s not the only way you can achieve long-form writing in Logseq, so today I’m going to show you three methods with their strengths and limitations.

Visual method

The feather icon to switch the Long Form Plugin on

How it looks like with the active plugin

The first is a visual method to avoid seeing the bullets, as they might create visual clutter and distract you. It’s using the Long-Form plugin by sethyuan. It’s paid and costs around 10 dollars. You can find it in Logseq Plugins Marketplace. It’s the first plugin I ever purchased and has so many features that I might need to write an entire story dedicated only to this plugin. Visually it is heaven! It’s so clean and smooth that it doesn’t feel like I’m writing on an outliner anymore. I use it when I’m not worried about the formatting of my story, but want my words to flow onto the page without worrying too much about form. Its main limitation comes when you copy and paste your writing to another editor, like the Medium story page. The bullets are still there. They’re hidden, not gone. Reformatting all the drafts in another editor gets boring sometimes. If you don’t want to buy the plugin you can get the same result by using Logseq’s native Document mode. Click on any menu of the app and type the letters T D, and bullets will become invisible, for free, in case you’re not interested in additional plugins.

Document mode in action. You click in the status bar of the app to exit editing mode, then type the letters T and D together, and you enter the document mode.

Cheaty method (only in spirit)

Rich text editor plugin in action.

When formatting got boring sometimes, I turned to an almost “cheaty” method to enable long-form writing. It’s the merit of yet another plugin: the rich text editor plugin by benjypng, available for free in the plugin marketplace. You use it by typing /insert rich text editor and it inserts a separate editor where you can easily write long-form content, and format it from its menu, as shown in the picture below. It’s very intuitive, easy, and fun to use. The limitation I found here is that external spell checker plugins don’t read the content inside the rich text editor. If you use Logseq’s native spell checker you shouldn’t have any problem. I don’t use it because I write both in Italian and English and seeing all the squiggly red lines of death is not very pleasant in my Logbook entries.

Tricky but favorite method

You have have to press SHIFT + ENTER to not deal with pesky blocks.

Now it’s time to show the last method, the one that I’m currently using to write this story. This one is pluginless. Logseq works with blocks. Every bullet you create and everything that lives inside that bullet is a block. That goes against long-form writing: when you copy-paste your content and the bullets appear in the final version, you have to reformat it. If it’s a listicle, you are fine. If it’s not, you can see how it gets annoying. Well, here comes my trick. Make your entire story live inside a single block. How? It’s very simple. You start a new line not by pressing enter, but by pressing SHIFT + ENTER. No bullets, same formatting, no further hassle. That’s the way I write my articles, short stories, and everything in between.

There are two other plugins that are fundamental for my workflow: the Focus Mode by Seth Fair, which adds a button in the right corner of Logseq’s menu to go in fullscreen mode and hide the sidebars, and the Hide Everything plugin by ahonn that lets you hide anything you want — in my case, the Linked and Unlinked references — giving you a clean writing environment. This plugin sometimes doesn’t work at launch, and you have to set it again, but considering how beautiful it makes the app look, it’s not a problem.

Before activating the Focus Mode plugin

After Focus Mode activation.

Everything you can hide with the Hide Everything plugin.

For those who might have ditched Logseq for long-form writing, will you try one of these methods, or do you prefer writing somewhere else? Let me know, I’m curious.