Ah, XyWrite! Still the most sensible text editor I've ever used. It had a few issues -- memory management with large documents, a very strange (but very useful) programming language, plus a couple of others -- but it was basically a wonderful plain text editor with easy to use inline codes that weren't too intrusive. (The only upper ASCII characters it used were 174 and 175, to surround the inline codes.) Just a joy. Then IBM killed them. (Long story there.) Now I use Scrivener, but for short stuff I find Markdown editors to be perfectly useful.
The real question, the one raised by Stross, is how to get the idiot publishing industry to change its hidebound ways. That's more important than killing Word. If no one uses it, Word will die anyway. What if the typesetters/printers started objecting? What if the people beyond writers, who also suffer with Word, started a campaign?
]]>