This is obviously a fine route to go if you want, but I've found simply booting into a text-mode Linux on its own partition (or something equivalent) gets the j

This is obviously a fine route to go if you want, but I've found simply booting into a text-mode Linux on its own partition (or something equivalent) gets the job done just as well, and means I don't have to have a bulky out-of-date machine just for creative writing. Going this route also means your creative writing workshop is portable, has wonderful battery life, and is trivial to backup--things I didn't have when I briefly tried hipstering myself with AppleWorks on a IIGS. As a bonus, when whatever I'm writing is actually technical stuff that I need the Internet for (e.g. a post I've been working on about a one-stop enterprise Mercurial server setup), I can have exactly the same storage location and document creation/publishing workflow, but work from my normal, fully graphical session. I'm all for using the no-distractions mode for writing things that don't require research, but I think it's equally important to acknowledge that a lot of stuff most of the HN crowd writes every day require an Internet-connected research station with rich media support, and having that station be something I can cut and paste out of (as opposed to e.g. an external iPad or Android tablet) is a boon to my productivity, not a curse.