Request for input from authors - The nightmare of long form editting on mac

Hi all!

In a couple of months I'll be sending my novel to agents. Currently I use Ulysses for composition which works really well to navigate the 85 K word manuscript. I can write in markdown and then export to a nice clean word file... Great... all well and good.

The problem I foresee, and have experienced in the past, is feedback, namely in line comments in the word file. During my MA I had a lovely PA who would decant this nuggets of genius into a document which I could use as a reference but, alas, my university days are over and I'm on my own.

Word, as has been stated many times and in many places, is dreadful on mac. It simply chokes when I feed it a novel length document. Unless anyone knows something I don't, word, THE INDUSTRY STANDARD, is not accessible, which is a pig.

I've just had a play with apple pages and though it works, not choking on the document, it has the usual bloat of poor accessibility design common to all first party apps. IE, it's designed visual first, accessibility second. Too much drilling up and down through boxes, and there is the barrier of having to export each time to a word file as apple wants us to be using pages files. Admittedly usable, but there is a high degree of friction in doing so.

I've had a play with google docs, but I'm kinda baffled by it. I did see Paul's delve into it, but it just all feels a bit... Well, janky and I'm not sure it would serve my purposes anyway. it feels like it probably has the same annoyances as apple pages, though I'm happy to be corrected on this. Also, if I'm honest, it annoys me it's a web based app. I don't know if I'd trust it with a thousand hours of work. It seems far too ephemeral.

Again, my main goal here is to get feedback on my manuscript and action fixes. It needs to be tracked too so author, agent, editor are in lockstep with the document's development.

I know I could look to parallels, run word on there, learn how to use windows, navigate the keyboard conflicts between mac and windows and so on, but that feels just as much of a pain as other solutions. The other option, of course, is to get a cheap little windows machine exclusively for writing and editing, which introduces another bunch of decisions and pain points.

I'm looking for advice here from any author who works in long form and works with others on documents. I'd like to think an agent and editor, understanding the mess of the most basic of tools for writing on mac, might have some flexibility on working methods, my tutors certainly thought this would be the case, but I'd also like it not to be an issue at all.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Is mac going to be my friend here or should I be looking to a windows machine or even a Chromebook?

I don't tend to read stories written by blind authors, or none that I'm aware of. Any names with commercial success I could look up and bug with such questions?