I like writing, and I write a lot, be it for work or for pleasure. I'm constantly switching between devices, so I've mostly written with online tools for well over a decade now. These are the tools I personally recommend for the various stages of writing. I choose to avoid Microsoft and Google, and most of them are open source and/or free.

✦⸻ for quick note-taking

• Telegram (yup, I use several "groups" as notes categories and have them in a separate folder from other messages; fastest option of all)
• Notion (slow on the go tbh, but a very powerful tool)
• Opera Browser (using the 'flow' feature)
• Evernote (haven't used in years but it's a solid option)
• Joplin (free and open source and multiplatform)
• Simplenote (free and open source and multiplatform)
• Listography (not an app, doesn't work well on phones, but I find myself using it a lot on desktop)

✦⸻ for writing long-form texts

There are many, countless options out there. These options are simple writing tools with little to no frills; some save your writing locally, some save it on their servers, some don't save at all. Most use markdown, which is my preferred method to format a simple text (bold, italics, links, lists, titles, tables, etc).

• Dillinger (my personal choice now, uses markdown)
• StackEdit (my personal choice for years, uses markdown)
• TinyLogger (minimalist, writer-friendly; can also be used to publish; uses markdown)
• Online Notepad (saves locally)
• mininote (saves locally, uses markdown)
• JustWrite (doesn't save; free-writing practice, has the option to download text in .txt)

✦⸻ for publishing online

Again, there are thousands of options to publish your writing out there. And again, these are just a few I've personally used and/or seen in action and can vouch for.

• BearBlog (my personal choice)
• Zonelets (create a blog within a Neocities website)
• Substack (more monetization-oriented)
• Ghost (more monetization-oriented)
• WriteFreely (more minimalistic, writer-oriented)
• Jekyll (that's for devs tbh)

bonus

• Various static site generators you can use for blogging

✦⸻ for dealing with word documents

These are the alternatives for a full word processor, where you can set page size, margins and other formatting options.

• WPS Office (not open source, but maybe more MS Word-looking for those used to it)
• LibreOffice (kinda ugly but works fine)

beware

The rendering of ODT documents between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office is not identical, and even if you use .docx or .doc format, it's still not perfect. Unfortunately there's no way to avoid slight inconsistencies in a document when you edit it with other word processors and then reopen it in MS Word. If you work only with content, proofreading or copyediting, it should be fine, but if you need to worry about the formatting, there's no way around it.

✦⸻ for pdf reading/editing

• PDFGear (my personal choice)
• Foxit PDF Reader (reading and annotating only)
• PDF-XChange (premium features with the caveat of having a watermark on your docs)

bonus

• Here's a good comparison between PDF readers/editors