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I've been doing all my editing in plain text (vim if you must know) for about 6 months. Then I use the wonderful PanDoc [1] to convert it to anything I need (usually PDF, sometimes .docx).

Everything's much simpler and much more peaceful.

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

That sounds like reverting to the style of much older word processing software such as WordStar.

If you use a Mac I cannot recommend OmmWriter enough. http://www.ommwriter.com/

OmmWriter is on Windows too, and is especially great there since there's a dearth of plain writing apps on PCs.

Have you seen ReText? It's precisely the sort of split editor you're talking about.

Thanks! I was more lamenting for wide adoption! Myself, plain old LaTeX is good enough, but my collaborators get anxious having to markup pdf...