As I write mostly for my own pleasure (no dreams of toppling JKR as yet) I used whatever the OME was that came with the various laptops I bought over the yeas. As time passed I tried: Rough Draft, Jarte, Abiword, Kingsoft writer, OpenOffice. Tried a free version of Ashampoo 18 and found it pretty close to word and so, having used word in various forms over the years I purchased a licensed copy os Asham at £14.00...I think? It can be a bit annoying in that some default options like say...Hyphenation are set to 'Always' so you have to reset to 'None' manually each time you start a new project. Other that that, I think it's pretty good and the support guys are very good. So that's me taken care of but what about you guys, what do you use to bash out your Booker Prize winning novel on and why? Cheers Ben.
Good ol' fashion Word. The stuff I write requires me to use tons of formatting gymnastics, spreadsheets, and stuff I can make on Publisher. It's Word/Excel/Publisher for me. I'm hoping to learn Access to store items with statistics for easier searching, though. Tried OpenOffice multiple times and found it to be lacking (or just old-feeling). I also have a copy of Office 95, but as much as I'd like to go super retro (I look the look and speed), I don't think it's worth the time to convert everything. Abiword? Meh. I REALLY Like Microsoft Write, but I'd have to build another computer to use it.
Pen and paper to start. After that anything ... not fussed. Have iPad so use Pages atm. My eyes generally disagree with screens a d I like the sensation of writing. I was interested in getting Scrivener because it looks great ... not available in apple store where I live though. I’ll probably grab it when I switch countries in a year or two.
Scrivener for anything of significant length. LaTeX (frontend TeXPad) for maths, which is rare these days. Nisus Writer for the odd business letter and other short knick-knacks, though I'm tempted to start using LaTeX for (business) letters, too. It just looks so much nicer. iA Writer for to-do lists and such things that need to be shared across devices for remembering (all the others can share, too, but iA Writer is quicker and simpler.) I have an older laptop running Linux Mint. The only way to easily share texts without much trouble is markdown ASCII (like iA Writer) and LaTeX. (Scrivener may work, too, but it's only a [somewhat official, but not done by L&L] beta that's running on Linux, and I haven't tried it much.) LibreOffice is cross-platform, but the way fonts, font names, and font families are differently organized by the two OSs means that every file with formatting needs work to clean-up, even if I make sure I use fonts available on both systems. LaTeX, OTOH, just works.
I've just started getting into LaTex, too (Texstudio is the frontend). I've had to do quite a bit of mathematical work recently and my freehand scrawl is inconsistent at best, illegible at worst. LaTex makes everything look beautiful. I haven't mastered it yet to the point where I'm comfortable writing letters, documents, and such things in it, but it sure does make my math stuff look clean and professional.
TeXStudio is what I use on Linux. Nice and powerful, open-source, cross-platform. Just works the same wherever I am. There's always something that pulls me back to LaTeX, despite its 'ugliness' in the source code you have to write, or that it is still frequently easier to do things yourself with that are automated in more modern systems (like automatic typographic quotation marks. I still prefer to use commands in LaTeX than the [existing] macros that automate things, which means separate commands for me to remember and visible in the source for opening and closing quotes. For most of fiction writing, it's just easier to use Scrivener or whatever and let it take care of things. But than you come across the odd historic poem*, and find you cannot typeset correctly all the apostrophes, single and double-quotes with any automated system at all, and doing it by hand in LaTeX is faster and looks so nice...) For letters, I use the scrlttr2 class. I have set up a template file with all possible commands (and bells and whistles demanded by the German DIN rules for high-end business letters) ready to go, and I just have to fill in the blanks. If I don't need an option, I just comment it out. In all 'traditional' modern word processors (like Word), I would have to spent a lot of time fixing the formatting that the macros in LaTeX do automatically. But then, I do not need to write a lot of such letters, and need only simple stuff when I do that it's not worth to fire up LaTeX... *For instance, Poe's "The Raven", which has " 'Tis some visitor". Correctly, that's "opening quote - small space - apostrophe - T". Well, if you look up some online version of it, you'll find that they're mostly wrong; and if you try to type it with automatic typographic quotes, the apostrophe gets switched to an opening single quote (most automated systems recognize an apostrophe within words or sentences, but not the quaint usage at the beginning of a sentence, where there only can be opening quotes!). Trying to enter correct typographic quotes without the automation is frequently quite challenging as there are no special keys for it, and you're forced to go to a complex "enter special symbol" routine. On the Mac, you can use the keyboard viewer, but it requires a maddeningly mental draining concentration to type. And then you have typed it correctly, and it is nice and beautiful, and then you open it in some program, which changes all of it back, because the "automatic typographic quotes" cannot be set by the file. Aargh.
Word. It's simple, familiar and does everything I need it to do. I got into trying other programs for a while but found it to be mostly pointless to stray away from Word. Unless I was in a situation where I had to use free software, I'll probably always use Word.