Use Atom for writing
I use markdown for writing most of the time and I like a light tool to do it. Atom is an open source ide used mostly for web programming but it can easily be tuned to make of it a distraction free environment ideal for writing. I have updated the atom css style sheet to have a warm gray background color, easy on the eyes with a bold font weight. And also hid the gutter with line numbers, you do not need line numbers when writing usually. One good thing to do is uninstall or deactivate all unneeded packages to improve performance. I have installed the https://atom.io/packages/wordcount to display the number of written words on the bottom bar. It counts as you type. Text browsing by markdown tags Works out of the box with ctrl-r or cmd-r then you can type words on the search input to find an H2 title for example. Markdown with preview Another interesting package is markdown preview https://github.com/atom/markdown-preview to works by pressing Crl-shift-m Custom style.less for Atom