[ApolloVonZ]

I'm a big fan of Scrivener (the mac version) for my writings. Not only fiction, but also academic writings, or organizing projects with custom templates. But besides that I think the post lacks a bit of information. For an article about writing, it's pretty basic and feels as if it's written and posted only to create some content and traffic for the website.

[tyre]

Scrivener is great. Also probably overkill for people just getting started. It's easy to lose yourself in setting up and optimizing the tools, and thinking of that as "writing work".

[ApolloVonZ]

True there are some simpler - no distraction - tools out there, some of them are pretty great and for some this might be much better. And of course nothing beats a hand written text. It's just a pain in the a to type the whole thing after. But for me it wasn't until using Scrivener that I managed to write more than a dozen pages before giving up. Scrivener just makes it easy for me to write piece by piece. While a long Word or Pages document just gets too much and demotivates me eventually. But yeah, everyone needs to find their own tool :)

[ghaff]

I like Scrivener for longer-form writing because it helps me to keep a project-level view while working on the details. Unfortunately, most things I write have to sooner or later get dumped into a different format for collaboration/editing.

[ApolloVonZ]

Yes, that's unfortunately true. Once you need to collaborate you need to export. Earlier versions of Scrivener still had the option to work on individual files with external editors. But I'm not even sure if this is still possible, it might be, but the files are all randomly numbered now and not named, so it kind of makes it impossible to use an external collaborative editor.

[iainctduncan]

+1 to it. Sure you can tweak up something better with tons of work, but it gets like 80% right out of the box, plays well with git, and has good distraction-free modes.

[edgarvaldes]

I have tried to replace Scrivener with yWriter, but I can't stick with it.