So I was having a discussion last night about this. Some of my friends take their writing and put it on a forum or a site like deviantArt, or pasting it into various other online fields - they love Notepad. MMOs seem to have a strong effect in this area.

Still others write for themselves using the software they use for essays, papers, work, etc. All their writing exists as .doc or .docx .

Then we have open source users with OpenOffice... Computer scientists and chemists with LaTeX...

Anyway. Curiosity! Satiate mine.

But but but but you want me to pick just one??

Working notes for stories go into Notepad because it's lightweight and transfers anywhere. Actual works go into .doc because, as much as I love Open Source, the formatting of OpenOffice isn't consistent enough for me, and I like to play format tricks sometimes.

After two weeks of 200 proof LaTeX hell buried in the 66-080 cluster when I was just a wee shaver, I swore that POS off for life. Like Emacs, TeX is a Swiss Army knife with so many sharp pointy things sticking out that you can't touch it without cutting sliced to ribbons.

Okay, can now vote for up to 3 options. Please specify what you use the different ones for, however!

Personally:
Notepad and .txt for portability. Takes up very little space, I can put it into a forum post, a description field in an MMO editor UI, a MUD (when we still played those...), an email, a deviantArt post, or any of the more heavy-duty word processors or typesetters. Also for, uh, note-taking... C&Ping bits of text for save-for-laters, like confirmation codes or email addresses or whatnot.

OpenOffice for any actual documents that will need to be printed up or opened and look nice. If I had a license for MS Office at home, maybe I'd be using Word there too.

MS Word at the office. That pretty much sums it up.

I use word and wordpad, word if I'm being fairly serious about it, wordpad if I'm just doing the computer equivalent of scribbling something down.  I can't stand notepad unless I am writing something codey, but I'll use it for that.

Word for most things unless I am working on novels/stories/poetry...then I use Scrivener.  Of course, if we're talking about code writing, that's a whole other ball game!

I used Word Perfect religiously throughout the nineties, and then around 1999, they released a really buggy version and it completely killed my mojo.  Since, I've been using Word 2000.  No, that's not a typo.  I have been using MS Office 2000 professional for about eleven years now.  For every new computer I build, I install Office 2000.  I'm pretty sure when I go for a 64bit OS, 2000 will probably stop working.  Otherwise, I write wherever I can.  750words.com is my new favorite.  Various blogs litter the interwebs with my random writings.  Notebooks and journals and notepads and scraps of paper also become sometimes permanent homes to ideas and dialogue and even full stories.

My grandma's computer only has 256 megabytes of RAM, and until my junior year of high school it was the only computer we had. It couldn't run word or open office, so I used notepad and wordpad for everything. I bought Word and use it now if I need any advanced formatting, but I mostly use notepad because it's easy, or wordpad if I want to be able to read everything back without sidescrolling endlessly.

Notepad is great for rants and rambles because you don't look back at what you've been writing; you just continue until it's out there, and then you can read it later.

I was so confused when I read this thread at 5 this morning. I couldn't work out why people were writing Programs with Word. Now I realize that "writing programs" can also mean "programs with which to write words" and I feel less confused, but more dumb

Due to a typing problem, I've dubbed "overracing"  I tend to leave out or type the wrong words.  When I'm doing long form writing, I've turned to writing it in a journal then dictating it into the computer via Dragon Naturally Speaking.

I mostly use notepad. A lot of my older files, which are random stories, notes, ideas, whatever, have been rendered unreadable over the years. So now, if I'm writing something random, I just write it in notepad because .txt files never get outdated.
Plus, I like the simplicity of notepad when I don't need the tools of a word processor.
On a related note, if anyone knows of a tool I can use to convert my old .kwd and .wps files to .txt, please let me know.

My second choice was OpenOffice. Notepad is nice for most of what I write, but not if it needs to look good. OpenOffice is the best free word processor I know of.

I also use a desktop wiki program called Zim. Its a small program that allows me to keep more complex notes on some of my personal projects. Its simple and I like that every page is a .txt file.