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A reader whose PowerBook-related question I had replied to wrote again to ask:

"Do you really use Tex-Edit Plus for serious word processing, as your email signature implies?"

I answered that it depends on how you define "serious word processing."

I do about 98 percent of my word crunching in Tex Edit Plus, but I prepare very little formatted text, and rarely print anything in hard copy. It must be two months since the last time my printer (an ancient ImageWriter II) was turned on.

If I absolutely need a word processor, I usually turn to Nisus Writer, although I have Mariner Write, AppleWorks 5, and an old copy of Word 5.1 as well.

I have TE+ fairly heavily customized and tweaked using its wonderful implementation of AppleScript, with which I have automated most of the repetitive functions of html markup and text editing, which are my main needs in a word processing application. That gives me a lean, fast, small, and very stable application tailored to exactly what I want to do with it.

This works for me, although while TE+ does support styled text and a fair bit of formatting (plus pictures, movies, and MIDI music files), someone who did a lot of hard copy preparation might well be more comfortable with a full word processor.

I suppose that one reason I prefer text editors to word processors is analogous to the reason why I like them better than WYSIWYG web page authoring programs for HTML markup; I prefer to do things under full manual control. Aside from being Microsoft products, Word 98 and later versions annoy the heck out of me by wanting to do stuff for me (its way) that I would rather do myself.

Nisus Writer is an excellent word processor that resembles a text editor on steroids in some ways, and is extensively macro scriptable as well to automate functions. It saves documents with the plain text element in the data fork and all the formatting info in the resource fork, which means they you can open Nisus Writer documents and access the plain text data with any other word processor or text editor without having to deal with a lot of formatting code cluttering things up. Nisus Writer is also fast and sleek and relatively small, and even runs nicely on my daughter's speed-challenged PowerBook 5300, and on 68k machines. It has superb find and replace functions, non-contiguous text selection, the most useful in grammar checker of any that I've tried, and a host of other innovative and useful features that don't get in the way or impose themselves when you don't want them. For my purposes however, Nisus Writer's support of HTML markup is uncharacteristically clumsy and poorly executed. I've tried using it for this, but always quickly revert to Tex Edit Plus or BB Edit.

Speaking of which, BB Edit is certainly the most powerful text editor available for the Mac, with a raft of text-crunching features, built in spell checker, and a powerful HTML markup engine. It shares with its freeware sibling, BB Edit Lite, a search and replace engine that rivals Nisus Writer's for power and surpasses it for intuitiveness and ease of use. However, BB Edit is a pure text editor that does not support styled text formatting.

Mariner Write is a small but powerful full word processor that has developed a tenaciously loyal following. If you like AppleWorks interface appearance, but would like something smaller without the overhead of AppleWorks suite of other application modules, give Mariner a look.

Speaking of AppleWorks, it has its aficionados as well, and is a tremendously convenient application. If you're a starting out with computing, AppleWorks really does provide you with all the basic applications in need, and many veteran Mac-users continue to use AppleWorks happily as their word processor. Personally, it has always seemed to me to be a bit of a jack of all trades and master of none, although the word-processing module is quite good, being the descendant of the old MacWrite and MacWrite Pro word processors.

Marc Zeedar's Z-Write is a nonlinear were processor which allows you to create an unlimited number of discrete sections in a single document, accessible with a mouse click in a second interface menu window. This is very convenient for storing research information, access to separate sections are chapters of a long document without endless scrolling, are keeping a variety of drafts in the same document. Z-Write's text functions are more like that of text editors than a full word processor, and there is no built-in spell checker or grammar checker for instance, however, it is an especially useful composing tool for serious writers and is inexpensive $20 shareware. Z-Write also has a freeware companion HTML editor, Cobweb.

Then there are the text editors, which I shall not even try to list here exhaustively. In addition to Tex Edit Plus and BB Edit, some examples are Merzwaren's Style, which, as its name implies, is a styled text editor that also supports AppleScript and comes close to being a low end word processor

Pepper, a very interesting application from Germany, is especially oriented towards programmers.

Blaze, a new text editor from Koingo software, is nicely executed but a bit feature-challenged in its 1.x version.

Daniel Kennett's Writer and Writer Pro, a pair of freeware/shareware applications from England, offer some unique features.

And that barely scratches the surface of what's available in text editors. The cool thing is that all of these products are either freeware or shareware, and relatively small downloads, so you can try them out before making any cash commitment, which will be modest in any case.

Except for BB Edit (which is commercial software with BB Edit Lite as its freeware demo), I can't think of the text editor with built-in spell checking, but several free standing spell checkers are available, I use SpellTools, but Casady & Green's very powerful Spell Catcher is excellent, and there is also the freeware Excalibur.

If you don't need the powerful but often unused functions available in full-fledged word processors, give text editors a look. You may be glad you did. I am.