I seldom write text documents. My job requires me to work with presentations and spreadsheets, not the most “plain text” friendly of documents. So it’s a mix of LibreOffice, Microsoft Office and Google Docs. Even some Thinkfree Office on my Android devices thrown into the mix.

Microsoft Office on my work laptop.
LibreOffice on my home laptop.
Google Docs and Dropbox for syncing between the lot.

I’m in the happy position of having a document workflow constisting almost entirely of plain text and PDF (with some postscript thrown in there). If I need to write something down quickly I either use plain text or write in hand, for everything else there’s LaTeX. I’ll sometimes use emacs org-mode for note taking, which is just plain text with some basic markup allowing emacs to fold around headlines and such. I think it’s quite capable if you learn to use it, but when I tried using it to export to LaTeX I found just using plain LaTeX was just as easy, so I’ve never really bothered with other minimalistic markup systems.

I think the time required to set up a LaTeX document is greatly exagerrated. Sure, it’s very powerful and flexible, but in reality you almost never unleash all this power. Setting up a basic documents with a headline, some prose and maybe some math takes ~1 minute. It’s only when you get very specific with the layout or try doing something new, that you’ll need to study a manual and debug your copy-pasted code.

For editing LaTeX I use emacs + AUCTeX. Always. For editing other plain-text files I use whatever is handy; emacs, vim, redirecting standard input to a file, or whatever graphical editor is available.

I’ve been using plain text files most of the time since the good old Atari ST days in the late 80′, just because of the need for being cross-platform compatible (Macs & PCs at work). I still have files from that period on my server!
I still do that today, but also use LibreOffice and Google Docs to some extent at work.
Writing and editing on the company website’s CMS backend is never done WYSIWYG. Instead, I use the “It’s all text” extension and my text editor.
I prefer Scintilla-based editors: Scite or Geany on Linux, Notepad2 or Notepad++ on Windows. I do know the basics of Vim, which I use when stuck on a console, but I’m not proficient enough to use it extensively…

I am using Darkroom for writing. Basically it is a simple fullscreen plaintext editor with some extras. What I like most, it opens the last edited file as ‘untitled’ and asks upon closing what name you like to give it. So I am invited to use versioning calling my files book1, book2, book…
If for some reasons the computer freezes or whatever, the last edited file is normally pretty at the current level. As ‘Markup’, which I need rarely I use / / or * * around the words I want to put in italics or bold later…

If you remember, I’m totally with you on hating WYSIWYG. For me, any solution I like is going to be built on top of Emacs — with the resulting document equally accessible to other editors. I’ve invested literally thousands of hours into using this tool, so it makes sense for me to use it wherever I can.

At home, I just use plain text for just about everything. My ~ and ~/doc/ are littered with short plain text notes. I did recently write two letters and typeset an article with groff (the mom package). It produces professional looking documents. If your needs are light, it’s a nice tool, but as soon as you need something beyond the simple capabilities, you’re deep into complicated macro land. It’s also not really markup, per se, since the macros are so heavyweight. There is support for in-line macros, but it’s pretty nasty. I think I’ll continue to use it for some small things, but I’ll stick with LaTeX for fancier documents.

I haven’t used LaTeX in awhile. No need to write anything that fancy lately.

For my blog, I write posts in either HTML or Markdown (both supported by Jekyll). Luke, I think I know why you have come to like Markdown, probably for the same reason as me: reddit. Am I right?

At work I recently got away with writing an official document in plain text! And this is a place where a LaTeX memo can be difficult to push through the official process, a profess which strongly favors Word documents. It started out as a README file a project’s repository. It grew and grew until it became a brief user’s guide.

I found that the biggest difficulty my co-workers had with editing it was the line wrapping. Emacs makes it trivial to keep plain text wrapped to 72 columns (M-q, or the auto wrapping mode). They either didn’t use an editor capable of it, or didn’t know how to make their editor do it, so they spent lots of time fixing up their paragraphs. I think this makes a lot of people dislike plain text; they’re not making an editor do the tedious stuff for them. I also had to rename the file to README.txt, because some of them didn’t know what to do with it otherwise. (This goes along with the confusion most of them emit when I open strange files in Emacs, to figure out what to do with them. If it has a unrecognized or missing filename extension, they just don’t know what to do with it.)

I said I want to use Emacs, so I’m not a fan of any of those web solutions. Let me edit a plain text document (with markup or not) with source control for collaboration/synchronization, please. No need to get the web involved in this!

I use (g)vim for plain text or LaTeX documents specific to me, often synced via dropbox, and Google Docs for when I need to actively collaborate with other people on the same document, because its way easier for non-techies to use and has built-in chat. In general I’ve found Google Docs to be much less bad about ‘hidden markup’ than Word/Openoffice are, though not immune.

Quick notes, planning, diagrams, etc I must confess… I use a WYSIWYG solution. It’s called a ‘notebook.’ It’s pretty fantastic because I always have it with me, there is absolutely no fighting with markup of any kind to get the layout I want, and I’m garanteed that it will remain readable for decades without special software.

Ok ok, I know what you mean. If I need to collaborate with someone I’ll use whatever their using but I’ll use Emacs for any writing which I have control over. I usually don’t bother with markup of any kind unless it’s for my blog or website in which case I’ll use markdown or html respectively. I do use flyspell-mode and org-mode, plus when I do creative writing, I use some extensions I wrote to keep track of my word usage.

Most stuff I do in plain text. Stuff for University I write in LaTeX, because that way I can type equations and other stuff like that easy.
My Text-Editor of choice is Vim.

For some formated Lists I’m using Libreoffice calc. So I can edit the List and export it as PDF in an easy way :-)
Ohm, whats Word? :-D

When writing minimally formatted documents, I usually stick with either plain text or a very basic markup. Asciidoc seems to map to my shorthand well. Textile is used for information on my own website.

When it comes to editing the documents, vim works great, but IMHO it does not matter what is used for the initial composition, provided that it is not too distracting. When composing something, most of the time is spent typing out thoughts, not formatting/editing.

When it comes to the topic of MS office, I avoid it and other WYSIWYG editors when possible. I do not like the contamination of the document with hidden formatting. I technically have one copy of it, but it does not function as one might expect. It will create new documents, but as soon as you open an existing one it dies.

For simple notes, I tend to use the ultimate editor: > file (as in, redirect stdin to file). No formatting except maybe hyphens for lists.

For longer texts but which don’t need LaTeX typesetting, I’ll usually write them in HTML; I know the language well and it’s pretty portable and open. It’s more verbose than Markdown, but I like the extra semantics you gain by using it.

Nowadays for certain types of documents (TODO lists, simple logs, etc), I try to use YAML syntax, because it’s easier to read by scripts so I can import/convert them without losing structure.

For everything (including LaTeX) except the first case I always use VIM, it’s ingrained ;)