What writing aid software do you use?

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.