Hey Luke, some great tools there I didn’t even know about! Thank you for sharing. I am using ommWriter. I’ve found another few more interesting apps at besttexteditor.com

A few years ago, went back to Vim, or MacVim, to be more precise. Does the full range of colors (I could never get the terminal based Vim (in Mac OS X) to do more than 16 colors) and has a little extra awesome sauce.

And Textmate still, as I find mucking up HTML and even writing more than a paragraph or two is best done in Textmate, especially with the helper snippets. For code though, I prefer MacVim.

I’ve been using Sublime Text 2. I started using it as my default code editor on Windows since Notepad++ has ballooned from what it used to be then started using it on Ubuntu too. I found that Sublime works really well for writing also, so I have a project just for creative writing that I can open and have everything there. It has a lot of useful features like inline spellcheck, project folders, tabs, themes so I can darken text and the background and that wonderful previewed scrollbar for longer things as well as the full-screen distraction free mode (just your text).

I started, back in the day, on a dos program call TcPlus (and Tcpro) – I can’t even find anything on the tinternets about it. I still have an old IBM PS/1 that runs tcplus. I liked the simple interface, no distractions, and it did have a certain amount of features. Now I work in both windows and linux – so Vim it is for me.
All the reasons you mentioned why Vim rules are true for me.
I’ve recently been trying out Sublime text2. Must say, I’m quite impressed. It’s no replacement for Vim (although it does have a vim mode) – but it is really nice, clean and has a funky document overview type of thingy (minimap?!). Certainly worth a look at.

The only time I find vim a little awkward, is when I’m ssh-ing into a remote machine using my iPad. I use iSSH (fantastic program!!!!!), and using the ‘:’ and escape keys etc can be a little frustrating.
:wq

I still use Darkroom, for some years now and I like it. For the missing system time (and battery state) I use a tiny sysmetrix overlay with something like 80×30 px in the same place the normal system time is normally shown.

@ astine:

Nice. That’s actually a really cool idea. I never thought about my word distribution and usage that way.

@ Morten & @ Gui13:

Thanks for clarifying this. I did not realize this was stock feature on Lion since I do most of my work in Vim or in the browser these days. It did look quite a bit more polished than the rest of the app – I should have figured it is a built in OS functionality..

I think the versioning you saw in Clean Writer Pro is simply the “Versions” feature of Mac OS 10.7.

You also have this on TextEdit and pretty much all the Apple © apps shipped with Lion.

Actually, that always-saved with built-in version control feature is a part of Mac OS X Lion. It’s in applications like TextEdit as well.

I tend to use Emacs for creative writing with org-mode and flyspell-mode to handle organization and spell checking for me. I wrote a quick script which computes the word count, not just total but for each word and displays it in a separate buffer so I can get an understanding of my current vocabulary usage. I use git for version control when I need it.

@ Mart:

You can install Gvim on Windows though. It works quite nicely, and it even adds “Edit with Vim” to the windows context menu.