What writing aid software do you use?

[invader_gvim]

 

At work on the long night shift, sitting on my staff desk I wait for the clients to wake up. I feel determined to write 500 words a day, and I'm proud that's its been close to 1000. My text editor of choice is VIM - the greatest text editor ever made.

I have never liked using the mouse. It slows me down and more importantly my laptop has one of those track pads where just looking at it makes it go crazy, and I turned that off. Vim is designed for a writing workflow that only uses the keyboard.

It allows you to have mutliple tabs open, as well as split screens. I use both features to keep notes to myself. Without it I would forget character names, details, and the finer points of my outline that I follow like a religion.

It has a very nice autosave feature that doesn't force you to use it. Autosaves are saved to invisible .swp files as opposed to the actual file you are working on. If vim closes unexpectedly or without saving when you start it back up it will ask if you want to use the real file or the .swp file.

Vim allows you to set the way it colors the text file. For example, I am trying to not use too much dialog so I have it highlight everything that is within quotations.

Once you get past the learning curve, words will glide off of the screen straight from your mind. It will all be second nature to you, and even doing complicated tasks such as drawing ASCII art or charts in pure text will take seconds. If using the terminal is intimidating to you, then I recomend GVIM which is the exact same program but not in the terminal.

 

[Senkusha]

For longer works, I tend to use Scrivener.
When I'm on the go, I'll use Obsidian-- because I truly hate trying to write on my phone.  For some reason, I just can't get into the zone, ya know?

But if I'm on my forum, I'll just use that.  Same with SubStack.  They have pretty decent editors.

[Tiffany]

I use Scrivener, what I like about it is that it is a one time payment, anti-ai, and most of all how I can keep my whole series bible in one place, my 1st draft in one place, my outline in one place, my character profiles, magic system, world building, book blurbs, ideas, notes, and it's all organized.

[beebz]

I use a combination of Obsidian, Ellipsus and 4thewords.

4thewords is mostly the gamified aspect that appeals to me, where word count is tracked to fight monsters. It even has a chrome extension so just chatting here is counting right now towards my quests!

Obsidian is nice, simple, straightforward, and I have a pretty neat syncthing + MegaSync setup so I can switch between my tablet, phone and computer with the same data. Its helpful because i jump between devices a lot.

Ellipsus is a google docs alternative that also recently came out with a subscription for writing insights, which i got because it made things easier for me to edit since it did stuff like highlight word echoes, show a visual representation of sentence density, readability score. And best of all is that the plan ends with you having a license to keep. I really respect their ethics.

And last but not least sometimes I just dump something in a discord conversation when inspiration sparks and then i drag it over to something else to clean up or post as is on the scraps pseud on my AO3 

[Senkusha]

I'm using Obsidian a lot lately.  I can draft notes on my phone while I'm on the go, and then sync to my desktop with zero issues.  Bonus, it acts as a personal Wiki too.  I've had Scrivener on my desktop for about a year now.  Someday, I really will try using it more.  It's a neat concept, and I really like that I can rearrange scenes with just a drag of the mouse.