I use many writing programs in my daily work. I don't think they are all necessarily "best in class" according to some falsely objective criteria, but for one reason or another, I prefer them over their competitors.

Text editors

Text editors are in a competitive class. For entirely subjective reasons that matter to no one but me, I prefer Vim for command line work, and gedit for GUI work. Part of what I appreciate about both of these programs is, they aren't struggling to innovate. Sometimes you have a solid feature set that the userbase likes, and there's little or nothing to be done to improve on it. In those cases, the "improvements" are only qualified as such by a subset of users. Some people will like them, some won't, but in all instances everyone who uses the program and updates it regularly will have to go through a new learning period. I don't want to do that with my text editors, and I'm glad they're reasonably stagnant in terms of new feature development.

XML/HTML editors

XML editors, on the other hand, really piss me off. The first thing I do when I install one is disable or remove the majority of its most prominent features and turn a few necessary ones on. Tag completion fucks up my workflow. I need text wrap, thank you, because I don't enjoy side-scrolling to edit a paragraph of text. Courier New for the default font, really? And 10pt on that horrible default font?

Despite my frustration with such programs, I find Bluefish and Oxygen to be the least infuriating of the bunch. Bluefish is excellent for Web-based work (HTML, JavaScript, CSS), and Oxygen is superior for DITA and DocBook because of its syntax parser. HTML tags are easy, and if you screw them up it doesn't usually matter much; DITA tags can be hell because the DTD is strict and in many cases nonsensical.

Document processors

This is a weird category, and I can actually only think of one program that exists in it: LyX. I truly enjoy the concept of LyX; it assumes that you're going to set the styles by hand at some point, so it just lets you go nuts with content creation without having to worry about presentation. You are forced to use styles to define the layout; you cannot select a line of text and increase the font size and center it and bold it and use that for your title (you shouldn't be doing this in a word processor anyway), you must use a style designed for titles. If you don't like the way the title style is fashioned, you must edit it yourself.

When I've drafted large book projects in the past, I preferred to use LyX. I would copy my plain-text outline into it, create headings from the outline items, and then fill in the blanks. When I was done with the draft, I'd export it as RTF, import it into Word or LibreOffice, and apply publisher-specific styles and do spell-checking and other revision work.

Though LyX (and LaTeX, which is the text presentation technology behind it) is intended for print work, publishers rarely accept LaTeX or LyX files for author submissions. This is one of those head-in-the-clouds misconceptions that a lot of free software advocates have when they try to convince people that Word is unnecessary. If you are writing a book and you think you're going to do it all in LyX or LaTeX because it was designed to produce print-accurate manuscripts, you're horribly mistaken. Maybe some academic publishers will accept these formats, but the half-dozen professional book publishers I've worked with either did not accept such formats (and in some cases had never heard of them), or they reluctantly accept them and then turn them into Word files.

Admittedly I haven't used LyX in a long time, but that's because Word (2010) got a lot better at creating ad-hoc outlines from headings and putting them into an interface object that makes a large document easy to traverse. Since all publishers prefer to work with Word files when dealing with pre-production manuscripts (what goes to the actual printer is not important -- the author is far removed from that process), it's easier to stick with one tool than it is to start in one and transfer to another.

Word processors

First of all, do you really need to use a word processor? If you're writing a quick note or list, editing a configuration file, taking notes on a lecture or meeting, writing poetry, or in situations where you just need to start typing right now, stay the fuck away from word processors -- they're only going to get in the way and make your task more difficult.

I've written a few individual and roundup-style word processor reviews in my day. I recall most of my conclusions being that OpenOffice.org (now LibreOffice, fortunately without the ill-conceived ".org") was the best you could do for free, and for people who truly needed good style and comment/change-tracking features, TextMaker was the best option. For many years, I preferred WordPerfect. It was awesome -- it had a built-in Oxford dictionary, so I could right-click a word and get a definition quickly. I could also select a word, then go to the Synonyms drop-down box in the button bar and see a list of synonyms. It was -- no pun intended -- the perfect word processor for professional book writing. That was version 10, circa 2000. Version 12 was not much of an improvement for me; it did have a really cool "compatibility mode" feature that made it look like WordPerfect 5 for DOS and Word for Windows, but what am I going to do with that? Then came the much-hyped version X3, and its default interface was a huge step down -- it had the mark of evil upon it: a built-in Yahoo toolbar. As far as I'm concerned, WordPerfect is dead. If someone from Corel wants to let me know when the Yahoo shit is out of the interface, and it's once again focused on professional writing (not legal documents), that's cool. I'll give it another shot.

One thing that WordPerfect had nearly 10 years before anyone else is tabbed document views. If I have two documents open, I don't need two instances of the program running; all I need are two tabs in one program instance. Aside from decreased memory usage, tabbed views also decrease the amount of space a Word processor occupies in the taskbar. I frequently need to have multiple documents open along with multiple browsers and other programs (image editing, music player, terminal window, text editor). My taskbar space is limited, and cluttering it up with multiple program instances wastes my time. Web browsers have had tabbed views for how long now? WordPerfect has had this feature for more than a decade. TextMaker has had it since version 2008, a mere 8 years after WordPerfect. Yet here we are with Word 2010 and the constantly-evolving LibreOffice -- the two leaders in proprietary and open source word processors -- and neither have it.

I think the source of the problem is, the people who design word processors don't actually use them for professional writing. Just like with XML editors, word processors always have the wrong default feature set. Not just for me, but pretty much for everyone who uses word processors on a regular or professional basis. You're always going to need to tune the feature set to fit your needs. For some reason, word processor developers think that you definitely want the most annoying features and probably don't want the most useful features. I don't understand why this is. I wish they'd quit guessing about my workflow and just fucking ask me what I want. On first use after installation, word processors should show me a sensibly-organized options screen where I can make my own decisions about things like tabbed views, "smart" text selection, drag-and-drop mouse actions, overtype with the insert key (who the fuck uses this option? Honestly!), automatic correction, reading comprehension level for the grammar checker, acceptable traditional spellings for some words in the American dialect, and the default file type and location to save to. Sure, there's an options screen I can visit on my own, but in every word processor I've seen, the options screens are badly organized, sometimes even to the point that they're split out into "options" and "preferences" and "customization" or other manner of settings balkanization.

Oh, and one more thing: NOBODY EVER WANTS A MEMORY-RESIDENT LAUNCHER. Do not load some shit at startup that controls mimetype file preferences, or pops up a helpful little window, or makes the word processor start faster. Fuck everything about memory-resident "launcher" applications. While my desktop machine may have enough RAM to solve world hunger, my netbook does not. Even if it did, I like having a clean interface that only shows options that I use, and when I want to launch your program, I will click its quicklaunch button or fish it out of the GNOME or Start menus. And by the way -- do not presume that I love your software so much that I want a quicklaunch icon for it. I decide who gets that precious screen-estate, not you.

There can be only one

With so many word processors to choose from (and in some cases, many installed and ready to use), it can be difficult to make a solid decision. I used to use LibreOffice for some things, Word 2007 for others, and LyX for book drafting. I now use Word 2010 for everything. Believe me when I say I'm more than a bit embarrassed about that -- I am not a Microsoft fan and I never will be. I hate the company, its fucked up business practices, its asshole executives, and its history of ruining software companies that have products I like. Lately Microsoft hasn't been as bad, and has begun vigorously competing on features and stability -- technical superiority in general -- rather than brute-force market dominance tactics. It's got a long way to go, and it may not get there in some of the more competitive markets, but the Microsoft of today is quite far from the company it was at the turn of the millennium.

So I guess it's not such a bad thing to say I love Word 2010. It's got a superior feature set for professional writing. I just completed two book projects using Word 2007 and 2010 (upgraded halfway through), and it was truly a pleasure from a software perspective. It didn't start out so rosy, though...

Forget about TextMaker

I was a serious TextMaker fan for quite a while. I've bought several copies for FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows over the years. 10 years ago, TextMaker was how you got superior Word document compatibility on Linux and FreeBSD. OpenOffice.org sucked hard for fine-grained Word compatibility, and CrossOver Office had yet to reach an acceptable level of Microsoft compatibility with Word 2000.

I stuck with it. TextMaker 2008 was my go-to word processor on Linux for most of the past two years. I used it on Windows once, and it crashed while trying to save a document, and I lost about an hour's worth of work with no backup and no recovery file. I chalked it up to a Windows problem because, hey, when shit goes wrong on Windows I am used to Windows being the core of the problem.

I upgraded to TextMaker 2010 about 6 months ago, and used it sporadically for a while. I liked it quite a bit. However, I thought I would use it exclusively for a recent Word-based book project. What a mistake! It crashed two times on me on Linux, one of them during a save operation (just like 2008 on Windows), causing yet another data loss disaster with no hope of recovery. TextMaker does not have an advanced recovery mechanism like Word does, so when it crashes, you're hosed. Especially when it crashes when you are saving a document -- probably the worst possible time a program can crash.

So I deleted it off of my systems. No more TextMaker. When I say I lost data, I mean I lost time and money. I'm not writing for the school newspaper or designing a flier for a garage sale; I am working on book manuscripts for money, and they must be completed on ridiculous deadlines. Unreliable software can't be part of my processes. So I completely removed it and upgraded my Microsoft Word instance from 2007 to 2010.

Word 2010: it's what Willis was talkin' 'bout

To be clear, I did not have a problem with Word 2007. I just wanted to see what 2010 had to offer. As it turns out, it's quite a bit of an improvement. It's like Microsoft actually asked working authors and editors what they needed in a word processor and designed a revised feature set based on those requirements.

The last nail in TextMaker's coffin (in my home office, anyway) was price. Microsoft dramatically dropped the price of its lowest tier of Office 2010. I bought it for $109, and I can "legally" install it on up to three computers. This is a far cry from the old days when Office was hundreds of dollars and everyone pirated it, or pirated an old copy of it and then bought the much cheaper upgrade edition (technically that isn't "legal," but no one cared), or bought a new PC with the ultra-cheap OEM edition. With 2010, Microsoft killed the upgrade and OEM editions and designed a much more affordable and sensible pricing structure. It is, of course, aimed at screwing the everliving fuck out of anyone who has money (such people/businesses are called "enterprise" in the IT industry; they are defined by their need for Outlook, PowerPoint, and per-seat licensing) while encouraging people to spend $100 for a "legal" and supported version that doesn't need an activation crack and a fake serial number from some shady torrent site.

So with Microsoft Office Home And Student with a 3-system license at $109 (more or less; the price on Amazon varies; you might have to get it from another seller, or put it in your cart and wait for the price to go down), why would I get SoftMaker Office 2010 for $80? The only advantage is that it works on Linux, but the supreme disadvantage is that it will occasionally lose my work (and it didn't just happen with 2008 and 2010 -- I've had occasional work-losing crashes in previous versions as well). Maybe back when MS Office was $300 or more, it made sense... today, with a price difference of $30, it would be ridiculous.

CrossOver

The downside to Word 2010 is, it doesn't work on Linux natively. I think Microsoft will finally complete the transition from evil market-destroying corporation to innovative technology company when it starts making software for Linux. When I can get the same Word for Linux that I can for Windows, I will unabashedly call myself a Microsoft fan. Until that time, I have to pay extra for CrossOver.

CrossOver what? It used to be CrossOver Office, but then CodeWeavers changed its product name to CrossOver Linux because it started to offer a Mac-based product as well. I can't really understand why, because most of the software you would need to run on non-Windows platforms is already natively available for OS X. Perhaps CodeWeavers execs decided to tap into the vast profit potential among Apple users; specifically, that they are unafraid to spend lots of money on unnecessary things.

Anyway, then there was a further rebranding earlier this year, from CrossOver Linux/Mac to CrossOver Impersonator. How clever. So the bottom line is, you need CrossOver Whatever to run Microsoft Word on Linux, and the bad news is the current release (as of this writing) only has a minimal level of compatibility. Once again I am restricted to Windows if I want seamless compatibility and stability. Unfortunately, my preferred text editor and HTML editor only work on Linux, and my vast OGG/Vorbis music collection doesn't play very well on the shitty music players available for Windows Vista (yeah, I should upgrade, but I'm waiting to get a new computer rather than upgrading the OS on an old one).

It's always something

There's just no perfect technical solution. Microsoft is still too competitive in too many markets to make its office software available on competing operating systems, and CodeWeavers is too poor to accelerate development on the WINE project to get Word 2010 working perfectly. I could switch to Mac, but how would I ever tell my parents I'm gay? Besides, I hate turtleneck shirts. And my preferred applications still wouldn't all work to a reasonable degree.

It's always something, isn't it? There's always some hassle, some reason why things can't work out from a technical perspective. If there weren't, then nobody would ever be able to sell upgrades, would they?