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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/1873
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

In general I find that discussions over the tools associated with writing are distractions from writing itself, in much the same way that I used to distract myself with endlessly tweaking my IDE/text editor when I was an undergrad CS major. We do this because tweaking and experimenting is easier than doing the thing itself. It's a form of procrastination, but it's a "productive" kind of procrastination--unlike gaming--we're better able to fool ourselves into thinking that we've accomplished something.

(This phenomenon's close cousin is incessant checking of social networks, IMing people, refreshing email, etc.)

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All that being said...

My preferred tool is determined by the type of writing I'm doing. When I'm writing fiction (rare), I like a fullscreen environment, specifically DarkRoom, because it's just me and my characters. That being said, Notepad is my favorite writing application. I compose emails, replies to people (like this one, for instance), and I even wrote ~85% of my thesis in Notepad before moving it to Word.

Why Notepad? Well it's basically _pure_ writing. There's nothing between you and your words: no UI bells and whistles. No distractions, no formatting beyond what you can do with whitespace and capital letters. (That's really all you need when you're doing an initial draft, anyway.) But you can look at other open windows, which is helpful when I'm composing a reply to someone, or need to reference another document or webpage.

One of these days I'm doing to re-write it to get rid of the bugs that've been in it since at least Windows 95. One of these days...

Original score: 2