I wrote the first draft of my first novel in Vim using Markdown. I've since switched to Scrivener, mostly for the general convenience it offers and especially t

I wrote the first draft of my first novel in Vim using Markdown. I've since switched to Scrivener, mostly for the general convenience it offers and especially the mobile apps and syncing, but there is a lot about that old workflow that I miss. It's really convenient to have everything in a single buffer optimized for keyboard-only navigation, and with Pandoc there aren't really any concerns around exporting to .docx. I absolutely hate WYSIWYG editing when I'm writing fiction, because it's totally unnecessary and only serves to muddy the waters when it's time to export the text, e.g. if some of the devices I was editing on were set to use smart quotes and some weren't. The text of a typical novel doesn't have much going on besides chapters, sections, and paragraphs, so Markdown really has everything you need, and for fancier formatting (like the side-by-side verse paragraphs in Stand on Zanzibar, just to name one example off the top of my head) I get the feeling that Scrivener isn't really flexible enough. There are better tools, like Vellum, and I think traditional rich text editing exists in a sort of uncomfortable middle ground where it offers just enough functionality to get in the way. But obviously installing and using a command-line utility like Pandoc is not something the typical author can really be expected to do, so they're stuck using the standard industry-favorite tools that do it all from a GUI.