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If you are fed up with Microsoft Word and thinking about drinking the LaTeX koolaid, take a good hard look at pandoc first. If you are attracted to the trendy minimalist markdown friendly text editors (Writeroom, ByLine, iAWriter, etc.), and thinking about using MultiMarkdown, take a good hard look at pandoc too.
Pandoc is a command line tool that converts documents from one markup format to another. In particular, it converts its own extended markdown into HTML, LaTeX, PDF, ePub, Microsoft Word's DOCX, and OpenOffice's ODT. Pandoc's extended markdown includes just about everything you need to write and structure a philosophy paper: footnotes, labeled propositions (i.e., "definition lists"), citations, diagrams, support for LaTeX maths... With few exceptions, anything you can't do in pandoc's markdown is probably something you shouldn't be doing anyway.
For more on the virtues of writing in pandoc, see this post by Michael Thompson and this followup by John MacFarlane. Note that this exchange is a bit over a year old, and pandoc has since been extended to support the three features MacFarlane mentions: LaTeX macros, and non-continguous numbered example lists with labels that can be used as cross-references (this last is not as flexible or powerful as LaTeX's support for cross-references: count that as one remaining shortcoming in pandoc for academic writers).
If you would rather not use pandoc from the command line, and you are on OS X, you might be interested in one of the following,
I switched from TextMate to MacVim, and haven't looked back. TextMate is a wonderful text editor, with an easy learning curve and a lot of powerful features. MacVim is just as powerful, and, for me, easier on the fingers, but it has a steep learning curve. And since MacVim is just Vim, and Vim is available on just about every computer in existence, my investment in muscle memory should be reasonably future proof.
If you use both Vim and pandoc, you might be interested in
I also use
Notational Velocity- nvAlt (Brett Terpstra's fork of Notational Velocity)
for storing quick notes and (sometimes) pounding out very rough drafts. But I find that I miss Vim's normal mode.
As things progress, it is helpful to keep track of revisions. For this, I use
Git is version control software. If you write in plain-text, you should use this. For more on using git in the context of writing philosophy papers, see Mark Kalderon's Blog and the PhilTeX blog.
The best tool for downloading bibliographic data is
I am hoping that Zotero Standalone is the first step toward a clean and simple OS X client. For now, I use
which bypasses Zotero's client, and sends the scraped data directly to
Unfortunately, it does not send the PDF along as well.
BibDesk is a great piece of software, designed for managing a BibTeX database with attached PDF files. It keeps all my PDFs organized in a folder, with reasonable names. And pandoc makes use of the BibTeX database for auto-formatting citations.
For reading and annotating PDFs, I use
Apple's Preview.app keeps getting better at annotations. I'm not sure how much better Skim is at this point, but Skim is what I am used to.
(This is the one thing that keeps me from seriously considering Linux: no adequate PDF viewer with support for annotations.)
- Quicksilver (an OSX application launcher and much much more)
- SimpleNote (simple text notes made simple on iOS; syncs with Notational Velocity)
- Evernote (less simple notes and not quite as simple, syncs with everything)
- Dropbox (sharing files between computers made simple)
- Pentadactyl (a vim-like interface for Firefox)