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I hesitate between classical editors (like MS Office, Open Office) and online editors which provide more accessibility.

I would say that I'm looking a polyvalent text editor to write my thesis. I'm student in Biology thus I would need an editor which offers me a lot of good practical features like autosave, support for summary, pagination, bibliography, but also provides in easy way to layout presentation, add pictures, equations, graph, ...

I will define the comfort by the ergonomy of application. I don't want to use a cockpit fly. Only few buttons which make sense.

By knowing that I'm going to spent a lot of time behind my screen to write my thesis, I would like to know which features, writers like to have in their text editor and why? Regardless of their activity field.

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How are you defining "efficiency" and "comfort"? I would doubt that the features "required" are required by all writers. To be honest, I almost exclusively use a plain text editor, do my formatting with markdown, then process the markdown file to whatever format (html, pdf, docx...) I need using a program called Pandoc. To me, that's efficient, but to you, that might not be. I would suggest trying to clarify your question and try to make it less subjective. – Ananda Mahto Dec 14 '12 at 17:27
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No it's not all in the question at all. Please clarify and elaborate on what you're referring to. Define efficiency and comfort? What are you looking to achieve? What are you using your text editor for? – spiceyokooko Dec 14 '12 at 18:44
To be clear, efficiency means for me the ability to setup the layout, handle of pagination and bibliography. The capacity to change a lot of things in minimum of steps, I think especially at management of summary and obviously the comfort is bound with this. My question covered more on a request for general advice. Which sort of features, writers do they attention within their choices of text editors? I just want a lot of advice to take a decision. @Ananda: Thanks for introducing me about Markdown, this language is really awesome. – rphonika Dec 14 '12 at 19:56
rphonika: Welcome to StackExchange. Asking for general advice is a discussion question, which is not on-topic here. We need focused, answerable questions which have the potential to help others. Can you edit your question to reflect some of the detail in your comment, and then ask what editor has those particular features? You also need to clarify "comfort," since (to me at least) that means ergonomics, which isn't a feature of a "text editor." – Lauren Ipsum Dec 14 '12 at 20:13
In general, and without more specifics to the question, the basic answer has to be that the editor has text handling features that are efficient and matched to the way they work. I use Vim, which I often call a "text processor" because, once learned, it is an incredibly powerful tool for editing that seems to anticipate my needs. Because I use a simple text markup, the features it has for appending/prepending/etc. are critical. But they may not be for you. – Chris Dec 16 '12 at 5:38

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For creative writing? Very, very few. Practically, near to none. Autosave, spellcheck (though that's quite optional), maybe italics or minor formatting. Maybe, maybe thesaurus, though I use external one without problems.

Personally, I was starting my writing with Cygnus, a simple text editor for Amiga. As Amiga died, for a long time I was struggling with various fancy editors like MS Word and getting mad at Clippy, requests for updates, autoformatting, autocomplete(ARGH!) and a whole bunch of "features" that kept distracting me from writing.

Then I recalled Cygnus and began seeking something similar. At last I found PyRoom, a free clone of DarkRoom, boasting the title of "distraction-free editor". It's fullscreen. It presents only the text. It has absolutely bare minimum of features and accessing them requires a key combo, they don't appear on screen unwanted. At long last I could get back to writing comfortably.

Since then I learned to tune out or turn off distractions of the system and of the editor, so OpenOffice Writer is my current choice, allowing me a bit more flexibility through formatting, but other than that, I use maybe 1% of its features while writing.

While editing, correcting, proofreading, that's a completely different cup of tea. But for writing? Autosave, so that if you forget to save, you don't lose it. That's the only feature that increases comfort for me. All the rest decrease comfort.

Now for journalism/scientific/research/technical writing the requirements may be completely different, but you didn't specify...

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