program for long writing projects?

[scrubbyfish]

For long writing projects (thesis, book, etc), what program/software have you loved most?

I usually do mine in Word or OpenOffice Writer, but I'm finding both unstable after a certain point, and difficult to move around within. Currently looking at Scrivener.

Your experiences? Suggestions?

For my purposes, it doesn't need to be free or extremely cheap, but I wouldn't go over $200.

[KMMK]

I'm very happy with Scrivener. I know I'm not using it to its full potential and it's still much better than word, especially for planning and outlining large documents.

[SurlyTroll]

LaTeX. A steep learning curve but we'll worth the effort.

[lizzzi]

I still like good, old Word. Written three book-length mss. on it so far, and a few 30 to 50 page papers.

[okonomiyaki]

LaTeX for thesis - or anything that you need to professionally typeset yourself, especially if it has math formulas or you need to stick lots of figures in.

For a book/novel/memoir - something that is more about writing/polishing and doesn't require a lot of finicky formatting - I would probably go with just a basic plain text editor (as opposed to Word, which is overkill).

Scrivener is great as a dumping ground for ideas - and if you need to put together lots of snippets of text into one big manuscript. However, I have found that I end up using a dedicated evernote notebook for all of my notes, and then just put it together as a text file somewhere else as opposed to using Scrivener.

The main advantage of Scrivener is the index card view, which can help you rearrange your work on the fly - I don't really work like that (hard science), but I can see situations, especially in the humanities, where this could be extremely useful.

So really depends on your needs/preferences. You can get away with a money-saving combo of Evernote + Sublime Text/Atom (all free) or get Scrivener if  it fits with your workflow.

[ShortInSeattle]

I am a big fan of Scrivener, it takes a while to learn but is flexible and great for organizing both your ideas and your final product.

[IllusionNW]

I use Scrivener as well and like it.  As others have mentioned, there's a lot of functionality that I don't use, so it's probably even cooler than I think it is.  But it's nice for version control/editing and for helping with organization, etc.

[netskyblue]

Here's a short article that talks about some different writing software:

http://www.novel-writing-help.com/novel-writing-software.html

[scrubbyfish]

Thanks, everyone... Paying close attention, checking out Scrivener's tutorials, will check that link, etc.

The great terror for all people writing long documents is losing text. In previous projects, Word crashed on me so many times once it got to hundreds of pages, and beyond that I started having similar trouble in OO Writer. But in researching this, I've come across a couple of blog posts saying folks lost control in Scrivener, panicked, and moved to Word. I know that fear well, so am pondering.

Ideally I would have something that:

-allows text input (no formatting needed at this stage; no pics, math, etc, involved at any point)
-auto-saves every few minutes
-auto-saves into the cloud
-auto-saves with a date/time stamp in the file name
-auto-saves not as replacement/update, but as a new version, keeping the last many ones too
-lets me see a side navigation of chapter headings/synopsis (Scrivener does this)
-does not require me to use macros (?), etc, to create chapters
-lets me export to Word when required for co-workers

Scrivener seems closest to this, yes?

[historienne]

Huge fan of Scrivener.  Wrote my dissertation using it, and about to finish a book manuscript (roughly 90,000 words) using it.  A this point, I can't really imagine editing a long document in Word.

Some specific thoughts:

For autosaving to the cloud, you'll have to save your Scrivener file to a dropbox folder or similar - as far as I know, this capacity isn't built into the program.  But the files are pretty small, so it's not going to eat up all your dropbox quota or anything.  It does to automatic local backups, so you can easily have (for example) your saved version in dropbox and your local backup saved to your google drive folder for redundancy. 

Scrivener will definitely handle hundreds of pages of text with ease.  You will want to break it into smaller chunks for editing, anyway.  Creating chapters is easy (and creating subsections/scenes within chapters - if your chapters are more than about 10 pp each, you'll probably want to do this too).   This is where Scrivener really shines - you can break your work into quite small chunks, while still maintaining the overall structure.  And it is SO MUCH easier to find a particular section, or to jump back and forth between two chapters (even viewing two sections side by side if you need to).  For me, this makes editing 1000 times easier.

Version control - this could be better.  You can take 'snapshots' but it's not set to do this automatically (you can set it to take a snapshot every time you manually save the document, but not every 5 minutes).  The program will also keep the 5 most recent local backups, so these can provide a degree of version control as well.  I mostly deal with version control by cultivating a habit of never deleting blocks of text from Scrivener - instead, I copy/paste to a research folder titled "Chapter XX Dumps."  This helps less if you want to undo fine-grained edits.  I also print to paper to do my editing, and this process creates a text file outside Scrivener every time I print.  If I really need to restore a section, I can usually find it in one of these. 

[okonomiyaki]

How tech-savvy are you? Do you have the time to learn (~5-10 hours)?

Because all of the features you list are part of a programming workflow (which is designed for text, since that's what most programs are) - including amazing, stable, efficient industry-grade version control - which would involve a combination of Notepad++/Sublime Text/Atom + git or svn + github/bitbucket.

The only problem is that it will require some elbow grease to set up, and probably a *very* basic understanding of a few linux/unix commands. The main advantage is that you will never have to worry about file corruption, random crashes and other nonsense again. Also, your files will take up minimal desk space. With a total cost of $0.00.

[Prepube]

Don't laugh, but I really miss WordPerfect sometimes.  Wrote my dissertation using it and it never crashed even once (this was 1994) and I still use an old version for some tasks.  I've installed WordPerfect 8 on about ten computers now because I wrote some macros for reports that I still like.  I convert them to word though.  I liked we because it was simple.  I could go 'underneath' the text to the for,acting commands, and I had full control of it.  I write long documents now in word, though, and it auto saves to my OneDrive as I go. My publisher and other authors wouldn't appreciate it if I used something else...

[scrubbyfish]

How tech-savvy are you?

Not one iota :)    Scrivener is already terribly confusing for me!

Don't laugh, but I really miss WordPerfect sometimes.

That's what I used when I started out; a tech friend insisted on it. I regret it, because those are among the files I'm trying to retrieve now and they're mostly corrupted (when I try to open them in Word, I only get the first page and a half of a 20 page document), while my oldest docs in any other program aren't. Happily, I still have print copies of those, so I will still be able to access the content, either by scanning into a program that will convert the content to an editable option, or by retyping it.