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Comment by icantdrive55 | Hacker News Reader

I don't use a word processing program much anymore. I just haven't taken the time to learn all the features, or care to.

What I have been using instead is Sublime text. I didn't plan on it, but just found myself using it to write. I know they have writing plug-ins, but haven't had the need to even seek those out. It probally seems crazy, but it just works for me now. Plus, most of my writing these days goes right into HTML markdown?

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Not crazy at all. I used to use Notepad with the font set to something proportional. "Word processing" programs have blurred the line between writing and editing, but in a professional publishing pipeline they've always been best done with separate tools. And the tool for writing, should be a tool that offers as few distractions to writing as possible. Definitely no editing or layout tools.

I am of another school of thought. The layouts of my documents are there to make them easier to understand, and I benefit from them while I am writing. So I personally do not like writing in a text editor, even though I spend a lot of time in one when I am completing other tasks. At the same time, I simply create or import styles at the beginning of a project, so I am virtually never doing layout while I am writing.

I do this too! I write most prose in sublime. It gives me spell check, word count, handy text folding features, and tons of other useful features without the distractions of thinking about styling. If necessary, I paste dump it into Pages/gdocs as a last step, but usually I just write markdown.

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