Besides Libre Office, what other programs/solutions exist in the Linux world for writers?
(Please, don’t suggest VIM. After all the memes and comments I’ve read, I’ve come to dread it).
I like writing but the standard Writer tends to send me in a constant formatting spree.
I want to get back to writing regularly and something that could help me stay focused and somewhat organized would be nice.
I recommend Obsidian with community plugins. Application itself isn’t open-source but your content stored as markdown files.
Obsidian’s fork of Markdown. Don’t expect compatibility.
There are extensions for obsidian compatability in Vim and Emacs.
It’s not compatible with other Markdown forks, but the whole Markdown ecosystem is a mess duct taped together by more forks & extensions that aren’t compatible either. Even the common denominator CommonMark is feature-barren & isn’t suitable for documentation or technical writing, but boy howdy will the next guy have his Markdown contraption to sell you.
God he says no Vim and everybody goes on about vim. Please learn to read. It obviously isn’t for programming.
Recommendations for OP aside, with sentence-based editing (das/cas/etc…) I feel like vim can be a really good tool for writing.
I honestly use nvim for my general note taking.
Any text editor that lets you write Markdown (all of them, since markdown can be written as a plain text file). It’s simple but featureful. I would recommend Marktext.
There is still an older version of Scrivener available for free, from when they were beta testing it on Linux. It still worked well last time I checked. The Windows version also runs really well in WIne, although it takes a bit of setting up initially.
Compatibility is apparently really good on Linux according to CrossOver reports only a month or two ago: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/scrivener
I have paid scrivener and it’s a fantastic product for writing a story… or a DnD campaign even!
I haven’t shopped around but I switched from word to onenote to scriv and stopped looking. This is from my experience on windows not linix.
Not sure how good the beta is. https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/linux-1-9-01-beta-released/31623
You can use their online web-editor (similar to OverLeaf for LaTeX) or download the open-source engine and run it locally (there are extensions available for many text editors).
Compared to LaTeX I find it much more comfortable to work with. It comes with sane, modern defaults and doesn’t need any plugins just to generate a (localized) bibliography or include links.
Since Typst is very young compared to LaTeX I’m sure that there are numerous docs / workflows that can’t be reproduced at the moment but if you don’t need some special feature I’d recommend giving it a shot.
Onlyoffice
Is UI mimics ms office and has comparability with word files.
Not open-source and has some limitations without paying but works on windows and Linux. Can even be self hosted yourself to provide a web UI for access to your own files Google docs style.
FocusWriter for a minimalist, focused writing experience. You can edit the existing template for a dark theme and white text. I rather like the typewriter font, Liberation Mono (it was Courier something back on Windows). Give it a try. I’ve been using it for around 3-4 years.
If markdown fulfills your formatting needs, then there’s no beating it in terms of focus and simplicity. Use whatever text editor you like. My recommendation would be Kate. It supports previewing the rendered document in side by side view.
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Not vim necessarily, but I would really suggest thinking about a plain text editor of your choice and some of those lightweight markup languages (Markdown itself, reStructuredText, ASCIIDoc … I prefer rST, but they are mostly the same). Exactly because it allows me to concentrate on the content and ignore formatting. Besides, formatting, do you write for print or as everybody else these days for HTML? Why do you need a large word processor which is build primarily for preparing documents for print? Every serious text editor has some kind of plugins with spellcheckers, grammar checkers, dictionaries, etc.
I like so say I want someday to see my work out in the world in the form of (e)books, so I want to keep my options open.
Eh? Both
pandocandrst2epubcan generate eBooks. All those lightweight markup languages are especially awesome for converting into various output formats.
Neovim
That’s what I use for my reStructuredText documents!
I’d recommend https://typst.app/. Super easy to structure text like LaTeX and 100 times easier to use :)
Norka, Apostrophe, Obsidian
Can I get some links, please?
Sorry, I was on mobile.
The spiteful thing to do would be linking Norka and the such but I’ll link them: Norka, Apostrophe and Obsidian.
Thank you very much.
If you base your opinion of vim from memes you are missing out. Anyone who can’t take 10 minutes to type vimtutor in their terminal is not someone to base an opinion on. These memes come mostly from impatient people that can’t read the docs. It’s a fantastic text editor.
That being said, it’s not meant to be used for written words it’s meant to write code and config files. You want to look for a word processor.
Abiword, etherpad, focuswciter are probably the next 3 biggest on Linux behind libre and open office.
Personally I prefer markdown for most things these days but it’s not exactly meant for word processing either.
(Neo)Vim is fantastic for writing when combined with some plugins and LaTeX
IMO (neo)VIM is great for writing text as well, when all you need is markdown level formatting. Personally I use vimwiki a lot (many years by now).
While I’m a big fan of Vim, it’s definitely not for everyone.
I spend about half of my writing time in VSCodium, which is a community-based release of Microsoft’s open source VS Code editor. There are several markdown, grammar, and focus-oriented plugins for the platform, and you can pretty much shape it into whatever kind of editor you want.
I use VSCodium for the vast majority of my personal notes, technical writing, and project documentation (nearly all of which are written in markdown format).
