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Comment by Condition1952 | Hacker News Reader

Condition1952

A bit off topic but what’s an easy to use FOSS WYSIWYG text processor for Linux?

I’ve tried OpenOffice and I became frustrated.

OpenOffice is a zombie living on the old name alone. LibreOffice is the "new" (it's like over a decade old i think) current one and e.g. ships preinstalled on big ubuntu images, for instance.

It depends on what features you need. Libre Office is a suite with database, word processor, spreadsheet, Abiword is just a word processor, WordGrinder is terminal based program specifically for first drafts that can export to ODT, HTML, etc., O20.Word is a clone of MS Word 2019, there are more: Calligrawords, Focuswriter, etc.

Abiword is probably the best compromise between simplicity, familiarity, and features. It's also very lightweight.

You should also consider Emacs Org-mode.

>>WYSIWYG text processor

>Emacs Org-mode

How is org mode WYSIWYG?

I think it fits. But also so do programs like notepad.

You literally get what you see.

Type some text.

There ya go. Its some text.

He he he. I meant “you compose, you set margins, you print”.

WYSIWYP

You are quite right, it was just a sudden thought before I hit the submit button that such a tool can actually be just as useful as a WYSIWYG word processor.

Does anyone remember Wordstar? It was not WYSIWYG but it was perfectly usable. I wrote hundreds of pages of documentation using it on a Z80 extension to an Apple ][. In my opinion such a word processor is in fact more productive than WYSIWYG. Moving to MS Word was a step backwards.

You can try LibreOffice like all the other comments said, but WYSIWYG is just inherently frustrating and imprecise I think.

KDE has Calligra: https://calligra.org

TeXmacs is another option: https://www.texmacs.org (NB, despite the name it doesn’t use code from neither Emacs nor TeX)

Additionally, there is https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DesktopEditors

I personally find it a bit easier to use with better docx support.

Libreoffice.

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