I've been using Day One for years for journaling. I like the fact to have to my most private thought in a space that is separated from other forms of note-taking. Also it's great that it has E2E, automatically saves metadata such as location and weather and allows images, audio and video. On the downside it has started to feel a bit bloated.

I use Notion for writing that:
- needs to be shared or collaborated with others
- profits from rich embeds and nested child pages
- Is directly related to a project that I manage in Notion already (e.g. Copy of a website relaunch)

I just recently came back to using Bear for thoughts and ideas that don't fit within the above frames. I just love Bears UX and the light feel to it. I've spent quite some time to make the tagging system work well for me now.

Whenever I try working on something longer I keep coming back to Ulysses. I'm a sucker for such beautifully designed and great to use apps and I spend a bit too much time finding the perfect setup – and separation of concerns.

And then there's [[Roam]], constantly on the fence of questioning all of this, because it works so well with my brain. Nesting and linking with transclusion on a block level has really blown my mind. But I'm still a bit hesitant going all in, given the fact that it's still in a very early stage and rough around some edges and will not be the most economic tool in my toolbox.

For quick drafts, notes to self, etc: Simplenote

I have two requirements, a) good sync to access from whichever device I'm close to, and b) the least features: this is about simplicity and impermance. Start here but then move it elsewhere or lose interest and delete.

For collaboration: Quip or Notion

Have been using Quip since forever, still think it's the smoothest rich content editor for team collaboration. Like Google Docs but with a polished UX and native iOS/Mac apps. Unfortunately, stagnated since Salesforce acquired them.

I don't like writing on Notion — the block-based UI gets in the way, but it's the better tool for assembling and keeping content around. For me it's the databases. Ended up using them often enough, that it made sense to migrate from other apps.

For public audience (eg blog post, presentation): run through Grammarly and Hemingway App

Grammarly when I'm more concerned about it being “correct” (ie corporate audience), Hemingway when I'm optimizing for readability (or speaking). Typically do first drafts elsewhere, then run through Grammarly/Hemingway. Grammarly too slow for actual writing, and lost text on Hemingway before.

I'm one of those who think as they write, so typically the first draft is just to figure out what to write in the second draft, and that one will change much into a third draft. So I don't mind moving the writing from app to another, literally a writing stack.

(This response written in Simplenote and copied over)

Notes: Apple Notes when I need to jot down something really quick. Otherwise, Notion.

Blog posts: Notion or Google Docs. It boils down to my mood or feeling. Sometimes I just love the writing experience of Google Docs.

Diary: Notion.

I tried Roam Research after hearing Nat Eliason and Anne-Laure Le Cunff praising it fanatically. I can understand the usefulness of two-way linking (which Bears kind of does too) but it's not my thing. To me it's really just like the name suggest: a tool for research.

Recently started using Notion.so. Pretty good in organising and love its neat formatting capabilities that make otherwise a boring writing process more interesting.

I started writing only this year, but I have this 'pipeline' for my thoughts:

• nuTab for saving random thoughts and links through the day; I go through them every evening to save what still interests me and discard everything else
• Notion for extensive notes (I might switch to Roam or Workflowy later)
• Ulysses for the actual writing (I want to use markdown and haven't found a better option... matter.md looks promising though)
• Gatsby for publishing on our blog (I just copy the markdown text to a file and add some metadata)

The first part was missing for me until a few weeks ago. I get most of the ideas while browsing the web and I didn't want to leave the browser just to take a quick note or save a link. Haven't found a good solution for this so I built my own :)

still on g.doc + Grammarly though I look over my shoulder at Notion

This is a fun one—my stack changes around, but generally here's what I'm using right now:

• Something to store ideas and notes: Right now, using Tot to write quick notes down, Notion for more actionable notes, and Roam Research to organize longterm notes and connect ideas. Drafts is another great app here, especially since it has actions to do stuff with your notes automatically (e.g. send them to other writing apps, add them to your to-do list, etc.).
• Somewhere to write. Once I have ideas together, I'll write longform content in iA Writer or Ulysses, the two writing apps I go back and forth between the most. Both are great; the former's simpler and focused, the latter has a ton of organization tools and handy features like a way to split or merge documents.
• Somewhere to edit. If working with a team on a piece, I'll then paste the text into Google Docs to get edits. Its collaboration features are best-in-class, even if it's not built for Markdown. And I'll also run the text through Grammarly to double-check.
• Somewhere to publish. Then you need a CMS to share your content if you're writing for the web. We have an in-house CMS at Capiche (as did my previous job); otherwise, WordPress, Ghost, or Kirby (which I use for my blog) are great options. If writing for print, I'll typically use Pages to format the finished copy. If publishing an eBook, LeanPub is a great service to turn markdown documents into ePub/mobi books. If writing something to save personally or share with my team, I'll save it to Notion (which closes the loop).

Notion is great for ideation, quick notes, long texts, and collaboration, so I use it for pretty much every step of my writing process right now.

I don't use Grammarly, so I export to PDF whenever I need to print or mail a manuscript for corrections. Oddly enough, the creative world is still reticent about the cloud.

Google Keep & Notion

I use ommwriter for distraction-free writing. It helps me concentrate on the quality of the writing.

It may depend on what the goal of your writing is. I am in the process of writing a book. Initially my stack was Ulysses, Hemingway and Google Docs. I would start in Ulysses to get to a draft, edit for simplicity using Hemingway and then move the final draft of a section or chapter to Google docs (for sharing with my publisher).

Until I found Scrivener. Even though it looks like it has a dated UI, and a bit of a learning curve, it is actually more ergonomic than Ulysses' more modern (but also low-contrast and homogenous) interface. Scrivener really helped facilitate the non-linear process of writing longform. I am planning to use it for composing blog articles as well. Plus it doesn't have a subscription like Ulysses does. With all my software subscriptions adding up, I've started to prefer the older payment model of buying an app, using it however long I want and then choosing to buy the next big version, but only if I want to.

I digress! For quick thoughts, I've tried a bunch of apps in the past, and I really liked iA writer for a brief spell. I keep gravitating back to Evernote. I've used it for years and the search works really well. I realized that with this kind of writing, findability is more important for me, to be able to look up a thread or an idea that I may have had at some point. Having it all in one place and searchable is more important than ease of writing.

For medium-form work-related writing, like a product requirements document or a discussion document that I may need to share with someone, I've been trying Notion, Google Docs and (surprise) Dropbox Paper. Google Docs just works, because even though it is ugly (the interface and default style), most organizations use GSuite, so there is no extra step needed for collaboration. Whereas with another product like Notion, I first need to invite them to my workspace, and then they sign up etc. Notion is also so SLOW to launch, especially on mobile, and their SSO has failed on me more than once.

I came to Dropbox Paper through an unexpected turn of events. My computer broke and I had to use Dropbox's website from another device, Notion was refusing to let me log into my account, and the Paper link was right there. So I clicked and I was hooked. It's fast. It lets you create a taxonomy of linked document like Notion does. It has fantastic image galleries, and the tables. Man, the tables are so well-done. Anyway, before I start sounding like Paper shill, it's become my new daily notebook for to-dos and more.

I'll answer from a standpoint of journalism and journalism-adjacent content done on the fly, which is my typical day-to-day (e.g. consumer electronics announcements). My ideal stack would be having no stack at all, but a single app that lets me eliminate as many bright colors from non-textual elements as possible, then just sends the writing away. The "sending away" part is what I haven't figured out yet, ten years and counting.

Typically, for longer writeups that will only eventually make their way to a CMS, I prefer either Typora or VSC, depending on whether I want minimal distractions or as many as possible. The latter scenario might sound unusual but I assure you it's as commonplace as any writing-heavy profession, some just call it "research".

I would have replaced Typora with Grammarly long ago if they bothered with adding theming or even just a hard-coded theme that isn't a display equivalent of a 10W lightbulb which I need to stare at for 12+ hours per day. But that's a completely different issue.

The Typora/VSC "stack" is only my ideal setup. Typically, I have little option but to use whatever terrible CMS a given client uses because there's no time fiddling with data transfers. This is usually either a heavily modified version of WordPress that grew way past its intended scope eons ago, or a lightly modified version of WordPress that grew way past its intended scope eons ago. For clarity, I'd categorize a "lightly modified" installation as anything that relies on plugins for extra functionality and otherwise implements little to no hard-coded changes to the open source codebase.

As a side note, this question is way too broad to be truly relevant to any specific purpose I can think of, even for a site/platform like Capiche. I know I'm late but if the OP is still following the discussion, they might want to specify the type of writing, writers, or audiences they're interested in hearing about the most. There's a world of difference across technical writing, doing press releases, playwrighting, writing scene sequences for TV, planning an interview, working on a blog post, composing a newsletter, coming up with product listing descriptions, documenting code, coding, etc.